Thing-in-itself, Referent, Kant...Schopenhauer
saw a recent post that got me thinking.
Recently have been reading a lot of Schopenhauer.
Schop maintains that the will is Kant's thing-in-itself (the noumenon) Essentially he states the we come to know thing-in-itself internally, via self consciousness.
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?
Recently have been reading a lot of Schopenhauer.
Schop maintains that the will is Kant's thing-in-itself (the noumenon) Essentially he states the we come to know thing-in-itself internally, via self consciousness.
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?
Comments (338)
The so called "referent" would be the simple act of will - energy in today's term - which can be felt all the time, made more explicit when, say, we move our arms or legs and focus on the act of moving it. Or if we attend to it by being observant of our breathing, and so on.
But, again, this is not exactly the thing in itself, just its closest approximation.
the act of will.... when we are not in an act of will (of, say, moving to a ice cream stand to by an ice cream), we would still be willing, right? I have never cleared up the distinction between "just" willing and the ACT of willing....
:up: I think that's what's often missed about Schopenhauer's idea of will. You may think of it as your own, but it's something you share with Everything. I read that later in life he decided that the thing-in-itself is unknowable. Is that your understanding?
I've never read any of Schopenhauer's works, but my superficial understanding of his notion of Universal Will, sounds similar to a scientist's concept of causal Energy. He seemed to replace the personal Soul with an impersonal Drive or Motivation to work for life & survival. In other words, a human being is merely a robotic machine programmed (by evolution?) to do whatever is necessary to propagate its core program (seed) into the future --- to what end? But if invisible intangible abstract Energy is the universal ding-an-sich, it must also take on the causal, material & mental forms that we observe in the world.
That notion is similar to the 21st century concept of Information*1 as the ubiquitous shape-shifting "substance" that exists in the various forms of Energy & Matter & Mind*2. Hence, the evolutionary offspring of the Prime Mover (power to create & animate Forms) is the essence of all things in the world. In that case, our perceptions of mind, matter & energy may be the "approximations" (representations) that Schop was referring to. Could universal generic Information be the referent of Will? Does that make sense to someone more familiar with his publications? :smile:
*1. Information :
Knowledge and the ability to know. Technically, it's the abstract mathematical ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. It's measured in degrees of uncertainty. Those ratios are also called "differences". So Gregory Bateson* defined Information as "the difference that makes a difference". The latter distinction refers to "value" or "meaning". Babbage called his prototype computer a "difference engine". Difference is the cause or agent of Change. In Physics its called "Thermodynamics" or "Energy". In Sociology its called "Conflict".
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
*2. Mind as Energy :
The mind is viewed as energies of relationships, with no beginning and no end, that give rise to consciousness in an observer processing change or information from the universe.
https://researchoutreach.org/articles/mind-as-energy/
His second publishing of The World as Will and Representation, which now included Volume.2, supposedly establishes his complete view on the matter.
It's hard to say. If he believes, as he says, that will is the closest approximation to the thing in itself, how close is this approximation? Sometimes he sounds rather confident in saying that will is the ultimate stuff of the universe.
But when he discusses representations themselves, as they appear to us ordinarily, he very clearly recognizes that these appearances are rather mysterious.
So, the answer to your question depends on the problem of similarity. If will as experienced by us is a good approximation to the thing in itself, then we have a somewhat decent idea of it, if the approximation is misleading, then it's mysterious. As I read him, he tends to lean to the former view.
What he really struggled with, is with the idea of how from one thing (will), many could arise. He used to be confident about this but appears later in life to become rather troubled by this issue.
Not a machine no, a creature of nature - not his exact words, but that's what he means. He appears to have something quite similar to evolution in mind and discusses some interesting ideas associated with such concepts.
He does not deny matter, but matter for him is a representation. Which is why his book is titled "Will and Representation", sometimes alternatively translated as "Will and Idea".
Quoting Gnomon
I think he would have some issues with the term "information", as it comes loaded with many ideas that are quite the opposite of his elaboration of "will". The will is a blind striving, with no goal in mind. While there are several elaborations of "information" theory that are clear that information is meant in a technical sense, it becomes very slippery very quickly.
The second option of mind as energy would likely be less problematic to him.
What I took away from it was an image of a diamond with many faces. Each face thinks it's unique, but logic leads to a collapse of the whole thing into a monolith. That's a side effect of determinism.
Unity and disunity are two sides of the same coin, though. It's mystical.
the concept of "energy" is an empirical one, a concept derived from the empirical world. this is consistent with Schop's concept empiricism (all concepts must trace back to representation), yet
contradicts his notion of will as thing-in-itself. will as thing-in-itself is beyond all representation.
:smirk:
. 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 .
Even if it could be said conditioned through the subject, does it follow that all exists only for the subject ?
I dont see how that which belongs to this, can exist only for that.
What say you?
I agree, it need not follow and is false as can be appreciated just by merely looking at how other organisms interact with the world.
Unless he has in mind existence in a special sense of the word, that supposition is difficult to defend.
Again, will as the closest approximation we have of the "thing in itself".
Willed actions, as felt phenomenologically, could be labeled representations, though they surely feel immediate in a way nothing else in the world does. So here it's tricky.
But I don't see a contradiction. In so far as we have to conceptualize the idea of the will in order to talk about it to others, we proceed to do so.
Yeah, my take as well.
Thanks.
I got the idea that Schop thought of humans as mechanisms from the Wiki & JSTOR articles*1, which said he denied the existence of a Soul (immaterial essence, animating principle, spirit), perhaps due to the religious baggage attached to the notion of immortal spirits. But the most general meaning of "Soul" has been the rational powers that distinguish god-like humans from mere mechanical animals. Did I get the wrong impression of Schop's contrast of Will vs Soul?
The article also uses the term "possessed" to describe the activity of Will within a human. Is that not similar to the notion of Spirit possession? :smile:
*1. Soul vs Will :
Arthur Schopenhauer did not believe in soul. However, he explained that every living thing is possessed by a will.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/janimalethics.8.1.0012
Quoting Manuel
"Blind striving" sounds very much like the common notion of physical Energy/Force. But, as the driving impetus behind Evolution, that cosmic Will-Power seems to have some direction (e.g. toward complexity & organization against impossible odds); especially here on Earth. That may be one reason some scientists are beginning to view physical Energy as a specific form of generic (multi-form) Information*2.
The original referent of the term "Information" was the immaterial contents of a Mind : Ideas, Facts, Intentions. Some of those enformed concepts seem to be the motivators & shapers of human goals. For example, the idea of a canal across the mountain ridge of Panama was so rationally & emotionally powerful, for economic & socio-cultural reasons, that it motivated the expenditure of decades of Time, and millions of money investments to overcome impossible odds*3. In a very real sense, Information (ideas) was transformed into Energy to "strive" for very focused goals. 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? :smile:
*2. Information transformed into Energy to do work :
Physicists in Japan have shown experimentally that a particle can be made to do work simply by receiving information, rather than energy.
https://physicsworld.com/a/information-converted-to-energy/
*3. Man behind the Panama Canal :
French engineer Bunau-Varilla energetically promoted a canal in Panama.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Bunau-Varilla
Note --- Was he "possessed" by "blind striving" Will, or by a goal-oriented idea/emotion/will.?
I recommend a recent (2014) book, Schopenhauers Compass, Urs App. This book draws extensively on Schopenhauers notes, manuscripts and correspondence, and also situates him very nicely in his historical context. You could say that Schopenhauer was a kind of religious dissident - he was very much influenced by the mystics (particularly the German Jacob Boehme) and, as is well known, by early translations of the Upani?ads. His idea of spiritual liberation was much nearer the Hindu mok?a than conventional religious tropes, as he proclaimed himself atheist (and the fact that he could hold the views he had, which held religious asceticism in high esteem, and still be regarded atheist says something interesting in my view. )
Quoting Manuel
The first sentence of World as Will and Representation: '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.'
Isn't that somewhat validated by the later idea of the 'lebenswelt' or 'umwelt' of animals? As you know, this was originally conceived by phenomenology, but was then adapted by biologists. Jakob von Uexküll introduced the idea of the "Umwelt," which can be translated as "environment" or "surrounding world" (precisely the element which is said to be excluded by natural science.) The Umwelt is the subjective, experiential world of an organism its unique perception and interpretation of its surroundings. Uexküll's concept was derived from Husserl's notion of Lebenswelt, emphasizing the organism's active and meaningful engagement with its environment. Charles Peirce's semiotic theories also explore the ways in which signs and symbols are used to create meaning in the broader organic domain. (Peirce himself is often categorised as an objective idealist.)
Quoting Manuel
He does call into question what we think we understand about the meaning of 'to exist'. But then, he is a philosopher :-)
You yourself as subject, as the one who is wondering 'what is this referent?', the immediate first-person sense of being. That doesn't need an external referent, although it only ever gains its bearings with reference to them.
Yep.
Quoting SEP: Schopenhauers Critique of Kant
Trouble is, reality does not care what you will, inflicting itself on you without regard for you desires. In that way it's not unlike like Schop's mum.
Or the appallingly poor thinking on display in parts of this thread.
Did you think Schopenhauer thought otherwise?
Oh no! Another outbreak of idealism. (Clutches pearls.)
:chin:
No, it's first person.
If you check out Schopenhauer's description, he's clearly referring to the first person experience.
The simple point is that the world is often other than what one might have willed.
That sometimes the direction of fit is the reverse of will-to-world.
More another outbreak of solipsism.
Ok. I don't think that insight, awesome as it is, has anything to do with the OP.
Having a referent occurs in language, and so is public. Hence of course a purely subjective approach - such as "will" - cannot explain it.
But yes, I'm pointing out what Schop did wrong, and what the OP asks for is how that wrong-headed stuff can be made coherent.
So I'll leave it there.
:up:
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.
Quoting Quixodian
Hasn't he explicitly said he thinks that ad nauseum?
In every possible world?
Too late for that.
Trouble is, its so unclear what idealism is. Thats why the discussion moved on to antirealism. But yes, idealism has difficulty in avoiding solipsism, as Ive explained previously. It usually needs Gods help.
I'm just pointing out that the "first person" there is redundant. Are there any experiences which are not "first person"?
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.
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?
Well, as Simon Blackburn has said, whatever our theoretical metaphysical commitments, we're almost all realists as soon as we walk out the door.
Quoting 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?
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.
Excellent :up:
Quoting 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.
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.
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.
Before I proceed, would you like citations, or is it just the subject itself is always going to be this way?
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.
Quoting 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.
I'm not committed to anything. However, I would try to represent Schop's case charitably and seriously.
A good place to start might be here:
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.
No.
Because there never is an observed without an observer. Notice this has even become manifest in atomic physics. And also please notice that Ive 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 [i]really must be [/I] 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 [Url= https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739505/the-blind-spot-by-adam-frank-marcelo-gleiser-and-evan-thompson/]a book[/url].
[quote=The Blind Spot, abstract; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739505/the-blind-spot-by-adam-frank-marcelo-gleiser-and-evan-thompson/] Its tempting to think that science gives us a Gods-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 includesrather than ignores or tries not to seehumanitys 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 were going, but weve 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 natures self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.[/quote]
Care to explain your version of how idealism is solipsistic?
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)
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.
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.
Quoting 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?
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 : Arch?, 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 Schopenhauers 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
Oh, right....
Quoting Quixodian
It simply follows grammatically that if there is an observation, there must be something observed, and something observing. It would only complicate the sciences to attempt to include the observer; how would you include the observer in the theory of plate techtonics for example?
I don't claim that we see the world as it really must be absent any observer, and I don't think that is a necessary presumption of the sciences. We can treat science as investigating the world as it appears; no need to make any claim beyond that. All the evidence indicates that the world was around long before humanity came on the scene, but that doesn't tell us anything about what kind of existence it had independent of human observers. About that we can only guess, and not too coherently at that!
That there has to be an observer in order that there be an observation does not entail that what is observed is dependent on the observer, even though how it is observed to be obviously does depend on the observer. You seem to be confused on precisely this point.
A point that you're not seeing the significance of, and which I can't explain further, other than to say that it's the subject of the book I mentioned, which seems an important book to me.
I linked to the original article The Blind Spot of Science about four years ago which you said, at the time, that you couldn't see the point of, so there's no point in my trying to explain it again. At the time I posted about that article, there was a complete pile-on by yourself and various others, saying what a crap article it was, belittles science, it's just click-bait. But, as I say, it's now being published in book form, so I'm more inclined to believe the authors than the PF contributors who belittled it.
Can you trust me that there is one, otherwise I wouldnt have posted them?
Not at all, but I don't think the point of the article was really grasped. Some of the comments were highly vituperative. I've recently discovered there's a youtube lecture series from the workshop (at Dartmouth) that was held after that article was published, and now, as I mentioned, there's a book being published about it. The salient passage in the book abstract is this: 'Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where were going, but weve 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." That is a salient diagnosis of the modern 'problem of knowledge' in my opinion. But if you tell me you don't see the point, then I won't press it!
As I've said before, We're not looking for the view from nowhere, so much as the view from anywhere.
You can't get to the thing itself by way of empirical observation. You will never get at it that way. That is where the realists/materialists are missing subjectivity/inner aspect of being, etc.
Hence he says:
Ehhhh .only you says it wasnt. At this point, its a tie, I think it was both clear and relevant and you apparently do not. Or at least question whether it is. For the sake of a mere tie, I see no reason to change anything.
Actually, Frank called one of the quotes an insight, which implies it was both clear and relevant to him, so its two to one.
Regardless of Frank, I remain in the dark as to relevance.
So he is saying, any sort of movement or behavior is actually Will from humans to animals to forces in space and time. He starts with the "immediate object" which is our own will and then analogizes to animals and forces.
It seems a reasonable point - and no doubt there are numerous complexities and implications involved, but isn't this notion ultimately similar to the basis of phenomenology? And even Nietzsche's view that truth/reality is perspectival. I would have thought overall a relatively common philosophical presupposition, even if it is antithetical to some accounts of science, say, as understanding reality as it really is.
As I understand it, the individual is detached from the will - liberated, in the Eastern sense - through what S. understands as asceticism. That's why he praises St Francis of Assisi and Jesus as role models (paradoxical in light of his atheism).
[quote=SEP;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/#5.3:~:text=When%20the%20ascetic%20transcends]When the ascetic transcends human nature, the ascetic resolves the problem of evil: by removing the individuated and individuating human consciousness from the scene, the entire spatio-temporal situation within which daily violence occurs is removed.
In a way, then, the ascetic consciousness can be said symbolically to return Adam and Eve to Paradise, for it is the very quest for knowledge (i.e., the will to apply the principle of individuation to experience) that the ascetic overcomes.[/quote]
Quoting Banno
The point, as I see it, is really rather simple. The reductionist view is that the objects of fundamental physics are the only ultimately real things. Life and mind supervene on them, or emerge from them, but the only fundamental laws are the laws which govern those objects. Laws in any other sense are simply conventions or descriptions. You may not hold that view, and many others will disavow it, but nevertheless it remains the operative paradigm for many in today's culture, and it is that paradigm which is the target of criticism by idealists, phenomenologists, enactivists, and others.
Quoting Gnomon
I don't know if he does that, really. Still navigating the section on Will, I find it overall a lot harder to grasp than his 'representation' (vorstellung).
Quoting Tom Storm
Indeed, the essay I mentioned from which the book was developed includes discussion of Husserl (and Whitehead.) Neitszche, not so much - I think his relativism collapses into nihilism. But those three, Marcello Gleiser, Adam Frank and Evan Thompson, are the kinds of philosophers that I most appreciate in the current scene. (Check out the Gleiser and Frank's Big Think homepage and Adam Frank's essay Minding Matter.)
Sure, and many an analytic philosopher, too. Apart from the favourites of the retired engineers hereabouts, few folk would advocate that sort of reductionism.
And there are problems with naively supposing that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Using poor arguments to defend a position that has otherwise powerful arguments is ill advised.
There are better ways to deal with intentionality, as seen in Anscombe and Midgley and Nagel and so many others. I still think you've thrown out the babe.
Sages of old saw it too, the deathfuck wheel which was just there, shining and dripping. At his best, Schopenhauer was this old school kind of sage, seeing through the illusion of time to the form of the circle, the ancient indestructible Wheel. He believed in The Loop, thought reading Herodotus was enough. He took the world as spectacle, grasped its essence.
He did not need to descend from his balcony for the glory of the revolution. There would be no revolution, not a real one. Just the bloodflower sinwheel forever. He left graffiti for others who might be able to get there sometimes, maybe to help others get there.
So do you think human beings are purely or only physical in nature? And, if not, how to conceive of what about us is not physical?
But then I suppose its much easier to take pot-shots at others than to actually come up with a real alternative.
As we've discussed elsewhere, different aspects of the world entail different narratives. In particular, physical explanations are distinct from intentional explanations.
And I commented to the contrary, with consistent generality, the highlighted relevance not on rules. Your originating mention, as stated, is, ipso facto, false.
Before the current New Age tradition there was a weird epoch where German idealism, particularly Kant and Hegel, got transformed into a sort of older New Age religion. A lot of this centered around life, spirit, etc. being suis generis forces, something that was allowed by contemporary conceptions of physics, with its mysterious forces that acted at a distance. QM and relativity killed off this whole line of thought, but it's come back in modified forms.
I wouldn't put Schopenhauer into the same "New Age" box, but I think his philosophy helps the move in that direction.
I agree. Schopenhauer influenced Nietzsche and Tolstoy, both of whom were pretty trippy.
And minds in general have always been a problem for materialists.
Yes, but this isn't remotely unique to idealism. Physicalism also has an extremely hard time with defining itself, and now that supervenience has fallen out of favor due to seemingly intractable problems, it seems physicalism is most often defined as "scientific realism." The problem here is that it's unclear that science can or should answer questions about ontology, nor is it at all clear that science writ large has anything like a coherent majority opinion ontology, nor that this ontology would qualify as what is generally meant by "physicalism." Hemple's Dilemma seems to be getting more acute, not less. Last I checked, physics has 10+ competing highly metaphysical theories about what physical stuff is, none with majority support within physics itself.
I don't see this in the history of idealism at all. Maybe if you assume all idealism = subjective idealism. But why should we assume that what is meant by idealism is its most unpopular variant? This is like attacking physicalism on the grounds that physicalism must mean reductive corpuscular materialism, and then pointing out that that ontology has major problems and has thus been dumped.
You can find idealism, panpsychism, dualism, all over the place if you know what to look for. It's easy to mistake respect for naturalism and scientific inquiry with respect for physicalism as a distinct ontology. If anything, I think the mess in defining either of the two terms denotes a serious problem with both isms. They may have outgrown their usefulness.
From my understanding mind (Idea) comes from Will for Schopenhauer. So instead of as for Aquinas where will is a power of the power of reason inside the soul, reason comes after will. But the escape from striving is the Forms for Schop. although Will wins over mind in the end (nirvana?).. This is all very fascinating. The subject creates the world so that the world can create it in turn. All in different respects. However pure will and reason/Idea are two dualities that must fold together into one principle. Freedom is the goal
This seems to be a "tactic" from some realists/materialists/physicalists. Conflate all idealism with subjective idealism (pace Berkeley).
How does "mind" fit in with Schopenhauer in your estimation? How does time/space/causality and the PSR "come about", and if it is eternal (like the Forms), then why is it the "illusory" part. Whence the illusion? That is where I think Schop's architectonics is murky.
You have undifferentiated Will, you have individualized Will (representation). They are double-aspects (flip sides). However, whence Mind and the Kantian structures of the PSR limitations? Whence Forms? Why is the Will "objectifying" it, and can verbs such as "objectification" even be imputed on the Will being that this seems to entail temporal progression (i.e. first will, then objects). It's all a bit confusing to say the least.
What's doing the objectivication? Well i think it's Will, the primordial faculty. Reason-thinking come from Will. This is interesting because we usually think of a conceptualization and only then an act of will. But will produces thinking and it's object is the Forms. Then thinking reduces to its base, the primordial will. I assume after death for Schopenhauer we are again pure will, pure anarchy, complete freedom. No more thinking, at least as we know that
Well let me break my questions down some more:
How does "mind" fit in with Schopenhauer in your estimation? We have Will, subject-for-object. We have the PSR. Where does mind fit in with all this metaphysical stuff? You have undifferentiated Will, you have individualized Will (representation). They are double-aspects (flip sides). However, whence Mind and the Kantian structures of the PSR limitations?
Is mind the outcome of Will + PSR?
How does time/space/causality and the PSR "come about", and if it is eternal (like the Forms), then why is it the "illusory" part. Whence the illusion?
How does PSR relate to Forms and Will? If Mind is the outcome of Will + PSR, then PSR could not be the outcome of mind. Or is it? If it is, then this begs the question of what is Mind?
Why is the Will "objectifying" it, and can verbs such as "objectification" even be imputed on the Will being that this seems to entail temporal progression (i.e. first will, then objects).
Thus you said:
Quoting Gregory
But how can a verb like "produces" be imputed on Will as the verb indicates an action which is temporal. Will is atemporal. There shouldn't be any ordinality to it.
:clap:
I like the term "deathfuck wheel". I think it's even worse than that. Rather, add in a bit of Zapffe + Schopenhauer, and you get "Humans- overshot the whole survival thing" to an "existential-being of self-awareness". Somewhere in our ancestral past, the human animal took itself out of time and out of the moment and into a virtualized world that is secondary. Thus the Fall into Time and the Exile from Eden. But not to romanticize any of it. Rather, it's simply playing around with culturally-given forms, internalizing it with our degrees of freedom (i.e. our personality-propensities and decisions) to "get things done".
The absurd presumption is that we are obliged to choose between two defunct cannons.
I ran a thread demonstrating the odd discrepancy between professional philosophers and the dabblers around here.
Kant wrote before Dalton's atomic theory and the wave theory of light. I suspect that if we could show Kant the LHC, he'd say something along the lines of "Well, bugger me with the root vegetable of your choice, I got that wrong!"
:up:
Quoting schopenhauer1
:up:
Felix culpa ! Our glory and our fall. Finnegans Wake is between laughter and tears.
Quoting schopenhauer1
:up:
We need myths to put on the wound. Like those. Our metaphorical grasp of being as a whole is no small thing. I still love all is hebel. All is mist, vapor, vanity, a passing show. I too claim to have seen the greasy sinwheel, which spins without my affirmation and despite my denial. My personal reaction was accounted for in the days before creation. Or might as well have been.
*****
Hopefully you saw my larger point that [s]all[/s] most the Kantian [s]bullshit[/s] influence in Schopenhauer is disposable cardboard applicator. Images do the work for monkeys who think analogicallly.
The PSR is a concept of the mind, which has intuition and reason. Intuition is the source of our knowledge of the Will. Reason is the consequence of separartion and time. The mind and forms are all illusions. The only way we can talk about the world and noumena is through the categories however. Complete personal individuality is denied by German idealists, as it is in philosophies of India and the Islamic world, and yet freedom rather servile piety is teleogical end. But ye speaking of any teleology or forms is strange and can only be strange from the position that Will is fundamental.
I'm not going to let you get away with that. Philosophy of mind still breaks down most theories at the university level into materialism and dualism.
Fucksake. As if materialism and dualism were juxtaposed, and paralleled idealism and materialism.
That's just poor . The sort of thing you might get by granting authority to a bullshit-generator instead of thinking for yourself.
And subjective idealism was never popular.
Yup, that was my point.
Oh, yes, understood.
I also remember the courses. Broadly-speaking the schools of thought were broken into dualism and materialism.. Dualism went over substance, property, interactionist, dual-aspect, panpsychism etc. Materialism- behaviorism, functionalism, identity theory (token-token, type-type, etc), eliminativism, and the rest.
Get your head out of your pompous ass.
That's the way it is presented in neophyte philosophy classes, sure. We know better.
We have, on the one hand, science which looks without to investigate phenomena and attempts to understand how things behave and interact, the world of phenomena is an interactive world that obviously only reveals itself via perception. We can observe things as they appear to us and this affords an understanding of their existence, as observed phenomena.
On the other hand we have phenomenology which looks within and attempts to understand how we sense, feel, think and understand ourselves and the things which appear as phenomena. It seems to me this is also a case of observed phenomena. A different kind of phenomena to be sure, but phenomena nonetheless.
Humans have always had intuitive imaginings and feelings about how things really are, because we generally don't like uncertainty. However, neither science, phenomenology nor intuitional imaginings about what feels right can be demonstrated to be reliable sources of knowledge of how things are beyond how they seem as observed phenomena.
We can believe, have faith, that any of these investigations yield truth and certainty about the absolute nature of things, but this can never be more than faith.
On the other hand, we can assess what seems to be the most plausible source of knowledge about how things really are, but there are no absolute criteria for assessing plausibility, so it remains for each individual to form their own opinions.
Schopenhauer's claim that introspection yields knowledge of the thing in itself might seem plausible to you, but it does not to me, the reason being that he claims that a blind will is fundamental, and I see that as failing to explain how we all see the same things, unless it is interpreted as energy which is structured to produce the things we perceive, or a universal mind which thinks those things into existence (pace Berkeley). The first would be a materialistic interpretation and the latter an idealistic interpretation, but would there be any difference that actually makes a difference between these models if the latter is not understand as an intentional, or even a personal, universal mind; a God?
Ah, so it's used in academia but it's not the "real" academia :roll:. Only those in the know, know.
Blah, cool stuff but not quite getting at the questions I had.
How many people do you think have really taken on board Kant's 'copernican revolution in philosophy'? It is far less part of popular culture than 'the selfish gene' or many of the other tropes of neo-darwinian materialism.
Quoting Banno
More 'unjustly neglected'. Furthermore, I know you and I have debated it at length, but I have never once gotten the impression that you really understand it - your rejection of it is invariably based on caricature of it - that 'the world is all in my mind'.
When someone nails their flag to the mast, say by using the name of their favourite philosopher as their moniker in an on line forum, they will feel obligated to come to the defence of said favourite at every turn. Makes for an inability to learn.
I think that there isn't much of a difference, and it would seem to me, Schop wouldn't have a problem with that either.
He was making a series of jumps from our "immediate object" (the self), to other objects. But the bigger jump was that this immediacy was some sort of illusory interplay that the Will carries out as its "devlish" double-aspected "representation" (the PSR applied to Forms I guess).
I must admit, I do not get how Will-Proper (Will unaffected by the PSR), is somehow the "real" reality if it is all double-aspect all the way down.
The richest man in the world suggested that we live in a simulation. The Matrix was huge. Continental philosophy is mostly post-Kantian far as I can tell. Braver's A Thing of This World makes him, Kant, the official father of a rich tradition that takes the entanglement of subject and object for granted. After Finitude understands itself as a rebellion against this clearly dominant and oppressive 'correlationism,' that cuts us off from being cut off from the Real.
But I do think there is indeed a blind spot in some thinkers. It's a macho thing. Toughminded tech-oriented I'm-a-truth-computer thing. Only sissies notice personality.
There was a fascinating BBC article a few years ago on why Inception, Matrix, and other multiverse fantasy films were such huge drawcards in popular culture. It suggests they play to our sense that we - including scientists - don't really know what is real any more, that the whole of existence could be a simulation, fantasy or dream. (I've gone back and looked for the article but can never find it.) There's also that fabulous 1990's movie, The Game, Michael Douglas, in which the protagonist is caught up by an EST-type organisation. But Schopenhauer's style of philosophy is far more compatible with these kinds of ideas than is stodgy realism.
I don't know everyone, so I can't answer that. I do doubt that there are not many well-educated people, including scientists, who realize that all we know is how thing appear to us. I find that there are some in science, in phenomenology, in religion or spirituality who want to claim that absolute knowledge is possible, but I see all of those as fundamentalists, the most deluded and potentially dangerous kinds of people.
I also think there are probably many, likely a good majority, of people who have no interest in thinking about these kinds of questions, so we are really only talking about people who are, at least in some sense, philosophically minded.
Look, I know that graduate level philosophy of mind is heavily based on "materialism" or takes that for granted to the point that it's not even materialism. It's Philosophy of Science adjacent and Cognitive Science heavy. That is to say, the easier problems.
What I think has happened is that philosophy of mind has expanded to many things, not just the hard problem. Fodor's idea of mentalese was in style for a bit. Debates over connectionism and computationalism. Finding correlates of consciousness in various brain domains. There are parallels with anthropology and social learning.. Extended and embodied cognition..flirting with ditching qualia and folk psychology in eliminativism, neural networks and their implications.. language and its implications (concept formation, semantics and meaning, representation, etc.). But these seem to not touch on the hard problem.
What I think happened rather, is perhaps the hard problem was put on the back burner for a while, and it has come back with a vengeance. Just my interpretation of the trends and such.
Quoting Banno
Oh blah. No, I don't even necessarily agree with Schopenhauer on his metaphysics and I've said that multiple times. I do however, find his ideas fascinating and try to be charitable to them as they are still relevant in the questions asked and the unique way he answered them. Obviously, if you look at the questions I am asking about his ideas, I find there to be some large conundrums and confusion with the ideas.
Plato and Aristotle weren't right on all accounts either, but many topics they brought up are still relevant today, and may papers are still using their ideas.
:up:
The world is mediated for us by screens. Maybe it used to be rumors brought by travelers, but at least then it was words which were clearly just words. Now we are moving toward screens that can lie to our eyes convincingly. These screens are even able to learn to lie better and better, because we've taught computers to program themselves --- to learn from examples and nothing else. We can't even understand the logic hidden in a billion parameters trained with enough electricity to run a small town for a week.
:up:
Great flick.
:up:
I always liked James' characterization of thinkers as tough-minded or tender-minded.
I expect that a crude realism will always dominate the lives of the practical primate. Most people get their fix from visceral metaphors for being as a whole. They aren't as sensitive to rational norms, aren't annoyed by holes in the plot of a story that does, after all, get them through the stormy night.
Whenever I bring this up, the reactions here are amazingly defensive. The first time I mentioned it, four years ago, there was a complete pile-on. 'These guys don't understand science! This article is just click bait! Who do they think they are?' (in a large part because I was the one who posted it and there was a mod back then who hated anything I wrote.)
But the original Blind Spot essay was not denigrating science at all. It says: 'This doesnt mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this.' The authors are are far less relativistic or perspectival than, say, Neitszche. But they say, 'behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information.'
So the key thing is the claim that the data of scientific analysis are mind independent. @Banno might say that, tsk tsk, he eschews this kind of 'crude materialism', but you can show that it is at least implicit in the work of many of the 20th c philosophers he cites. It's not that they elaborate or make a big deal out of an explicitly materialist worldview, but that their 'ordinary language' philosophy abjures metaphysics, and it generally leaves the scientific realist attitude unquestioned. It is assumed, more than propogated, because the alternatives seem to carry distasteful metaphysical implications.
Anyway - why I always bring this up, is because phenomenology and Continental philosophy is much more alive to this issue than is the Anglosphere since Gilbert Ryle. I contend that most English-speaking philosophy departments do assume an implicitly naturalist attitude with all the metaphysical commitments this entails. Not so for European philosophers. And that, I contend, is because idealist philosophy lives on in the phenomenological tradition - not in its original form, of course, but mediated through Husserl and his successors who really do understand and take on board transcendental idealism. (Phew, long post, sorry. Had to get it off my chest.)
I agree, it seems incoherent.
The realist attitude is the only possible attitude in the context of the common world we all obviously share. The naive move is to extrapolate this attitude as an absolute. To be sure many people with no interest in metaphysical ideas do this simply because they don't see any possible context other than that of the phenomenal world.
As a general comment on your post I think you are over-generalizing, jumping to unwarranted conclusions about what most people think. In any case since most people are not here discussing this topic with us, what does it matter what they think? I see arguments as being important, not concern, whether negative or positive, about general consensus.
Where we agree is that science misapplied goes badly astray.
Right. So when I make this point, which to me is a crucial point, please don't keep saying 'oh yeah, so what. Everyone knows that.' It's kind of annoying. :angry:
I think some people do indeed hold this to-me-problematic position. As a holist, I say it's just confusion to think concepts/entities have meaning independently. Everything is grounded in the community's lifeworld. If there's anything that can't rationally be doubted, it's this enworlded embodied community that strives to be rational. This framework gives scientific entities their sense in the first place. So they can't be fundamental except as legos in a game that tries to build the world from them ---without seemingly being able to touch the problem of being which is presuppose throughout.
Right. Most of the issues I refer to are the consequences of the attempt to apply the methods of science to the problems of philosophy. Sorry if I have to keep beating that drum, but it's the only one I have.
The point is more a sociological than a philosophical one.
Quoting Quixodian
Sure, but that is just one among approach among others. Are you saying that some approaches should not be pursued?
Also, I think the (ideal) scientific attitude of attempting to find flaws in your position rather than searching only for confirmation of it, is also best philosophical practice.
Right, again, cool stuff, but doesn't answer my question. 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.
There was a recent article about a metastudy of referencing in philosophical papers, looking at groupings - who referenced who. Where previously there were two families, roughly analytic and non-analytic, the paper argued for a third grouping, a scientistic approach to philosophy.
But I don't think that's what we see here, from the retired engineers.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Here are some cribbed notes:
For Schopenhauer Subjectivity includes Reason, Understanding and Will.
Will is the inner drive of which the forces of physics (attraction, repulsion, etc) are an outer manifestation.
Reason is the capacity to form abstract concepts. Schopenhauer is consistent with the larger tradition in saying that this is the prerogative of h. sapiens. (He implicitly recognises evolution although obviously not natural selection as that was published 40 years after his major work.)
Understanding automatically provides a spatio-temporal conceptual framework for our experience which is pre-rational (from Kants Transcendental Idealism)
Will is the primal drive that manifests as feelings, all of which are ultimately reducible to pleasure and pain in relation to willed objects, often subliminally.
That doesn't follow. Indeed, it's not even grammatical.
Quoting Gregory
And yet here you are, with a presumably finite method, telling us about will. The contradiction ought be obvious.
Quoting Gregory
And yet we have mathematics that set out various infinities in detail.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well, no. It's dreadful. But we are not supposed to say so? Perhaps we should let folk post bad thinking, but let's not congratulate them for it.
Drum or meat?
"The tendency to gravity in the stone is precisely as inexplicable as is thinking in the human brain, and so on this score, we could also infer a spirit in the stone. 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 thought the materialists of his day and the subjective idealists (Berkeley, Fichte) were both wrong.
Today's view of materialism is outright incoherent if we take as benchmark Dennett or the Churchlands as main figures, it barely makes any sense. As for "subjective idealists", if there are any, don't arise much in discussion, maybe Kastrup gets a mention sometimes, but has his own issues.
Obviously any avenue of research you find interesting ought to be pursued, but it does no harm to be more-or-less clear of what you mean when you say "materialist", "idealist" and so on.
As for the thing in itself, whether Kant was right, or Schopenhauer or Cudworth or maybe even Plotinus is more "on the right track", we do not know. But, aside from Plotinus (who can be read in secular manner), this is no mysticism, it's just sensible, heck even John Lock agreed with it - though he called it "substance", still, extremely similar idea.
Now, the more we speculate on its nature in a positive sense - aside from brief comments - the more liable we are to make mistakes. Schopenhauer avoids this, mostly and provides interesting reasons, but as with anything on the edge of our understanding, not unlike quantum mechanics, a lot of woo can arise.
:up: I made the point earlier that "will' might be thought of as energy, which in the current paradigm is understood to be matter. But then how is a "blind will" contrasted with a "dead matter"? Perhaps we can think of matter ("will") as alive, but not conscious, but then it would not seem to qualify as mind.
I could be mistaken, but this seems more Kant than Schopenhauer's take on Kant.
So you would regard all of neo-Platonism to be a waste of time?
There's also a very pungent passage in the beginning of WWR which I never tire of posting. It's a lengthy quote but well worth reading:
[quote=Schopenhauer;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-h/38427-h.html#:~:text=Of%20all%20systems%20of%20philosophy]Of all systems of philosophy which start from the object, the most consistent, and that which may be carried furthest, is simple materialism. It regards matter, and with it time and space, as existing absolutely, and ignores the relation to the subject in which alone all this really exists. It then lays hold of the law of causality as a guiding principle or clue, regarding it as a self-existent order (or arrangement) of things, veritas aeterna, and so fails to take account of the understanding, in which and for which alone causality is.
It seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemistry, to polarity (i.e. electromagnetism), to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibilitythat is, knowledgewhich would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality.
Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final resultknowledge, which it reached so laboriously was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous petitio principii (i.e. circular reasoning) reveals itself unexpectedly; for suddenly the last link is seen to be the starting-point, the chain a circle, and the materialist is like Baron Münchausen who, when swimming in water on horseback, drew the horse into the air with his legs, and himself also by his cue.
The fundamental absurdity of materialism is that it starts from the objective, and takes as the ultimate ground of explanation something objective, whether it be matter in the abstract, simply as it is thought, or after it has taken form, is empirically giventhat is to say, is substance, the chemical element with its primary relations. Some such thing it takes, as existing absolutely and in itself, in order that it may evolve organic nature and finally the knowing subject from it, and explain them adequately by means of it; whereas in truth all that is objective is already determined as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject through its forms of knowing, and presupposes them; and consequently it entirely disappears if we think the subject away. [/quote]
:up:
I think something like what you suggest is quite true. We have to purge ourselves of the idea of "dead and stupid matter". To be clear, such a view was entirely coherent and sensible (for the most part, some acute observer like Gassendi, Locke and Hume noticed something strange here), that's what matter looked like for those who studied it, with the technology and theories they had.
With what we know now, matter is not nearly as vulgar as we once thought. Nevertheless, we can't say it's dead exactly (that's a human category, after all - it's in biology too, but it's a bit unclear it seems to me), but we can't say it's alive either. It just is. Maybe it is a blind striving of some kind, a sort of impetus or tendency to just go on, and perhaps, complexify itself, to some degree.
That's a fantastic quote of his, and applies entirely to most (if not at all) of those who call themselves "illusionists", Frankish, Churchland, Rey and others.
But they wouldn't find this reasoning convincing because, they don't believe that in having consciousness, we know anything about it. Which just manifestly and clearly overlooks some utterly obvious and important factors, which have played a large part in the history of philosophy, including the nature of identity, continuity through time, the nature of testimony, discussions about the appearance of ideas and on and on.
But it seems some of the old problems remain, in slightly different terminology. Thankfully, it's not a very popular current, because of its obvious problems, not unlike panpsychism, which also has its issues and followers.
But that's where I think that Schopenhauer is brilliant, and that they are stupid. The nature of their own being is something they're ignoring (and there's a word for that, although it's not polite.)
Quoting Manuel
Yes, we can't say matter is alive in the sense that organisms are understood to be alive, because that would dissolve the distinction between life and non-life, and we can't have that.
The interesting point for me is that if we are not concerned with anything beyond how things appear to us, then we have no need for the idea of fundamental substance, because such a thing could never appear to us, end even if it could we would have no way of knowing whether it was fundamental.
So, the in itself, for me, is just a placeholder for something we cannot help but think, but have no way to identify, and that is why I find Schopenhauer's philosophy to be as "stupid" as those materialists he criticizes.
This stupidity is exemplified in this:Quoting Schopenhauer
There is no way of knowing whether causality is or is not inherent in the nature of things, since all we know are things as they appear to us, and from that no conclusion about any absolute natures are warranted. Unfortunately, it seems that human pride cannot stand the fact that there are, just by definition, things we simply cannot know. If appearances are all we know, and I would include in that category both extrospective and introspective appearances, and if appearances may be deceptive, then it naturally follows that there are things we cannot know.
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:
Quoting 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
Then, to me, not much of an explanation. All things can be solved thus.
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.
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.
Quoting 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:
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 Upani?ads, 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:
and previously put in more detail along similar lines:
Quoting schopenhauer1
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 ?
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.
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.
Quoting 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 Mah?y?na (around first century CE) of N?g?rjuna (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 Mah?y?na 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.
Let me know if you find anything.
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".
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.
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 dont require demonstration.
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.
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
Yeah, those damn demons. If one of em wants to make me only think its me counting my own fingers, not much I can do about it.
As you say, its 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:
Quoting 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
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
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
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.
"Here we have a wide ocean before us, but we must contract our sails." As Cudworth puts the matter.
You give good arguments on a most difficult topic: to account for one-ness in an ocean of multiplicity. I currently have no horse on either side, but I think the logic is a bit hard to beat:
What comes prior to something, must be simpler that the resultant. Likewise, these separate things we see in the universe, must have been more closely united then they are now and our best theory suggests something like this via the Big Bang Model.
The issue is if we can maintain that all is one, or if we are forced to say that there are several simple things, which cannot be further united, for whatever reason.
A most interesting topic, probably beyond our understanding. But you have a point, no doubt.
I see it as fatal to Schop's own endeavor, as interesting as it is.
Quoting Manuel
This would be contra, Schop though. This would externalize time/space in a way that is contrary to Schop's idea that Will is atemporal. The unity is ever-present and now, and not something in the past. However, I do recognize that ideas like the "block universe" can preserve Schop and the Big Bang perhaps. What is clear though, is that time is not metaphysically real, only epistemically so for Schopenhauer.
Correct. And, incidentally, also Kant's flaw - which they could not have predicted.
I think modern physics shows that space and time exist external to us, while not denying that we have a particular way of interpreting and cognizing these aspects.
So I am not clear that time is not metaphysically real, some physicists see it as fundamental. Others as emergent.
But I do agree that the specific version of the will as expressed by Schopenhauer, while I think valid in some important respects, does break down when it comes to multiplicity. Perhaps Mainlander does a better job here.
At least he has an explanation! It's pessimistically theological
What I find interesting is that this seems to be an even more pessimistic idea than Schop's. Whereby we can go back to the comfort of a womb-like unity with the hope of Nirvana in Schopenhauer, Mainlander's individuation is complete and isolated, leading to complete annihilation. No unity, but intractably individuated. All is individual, all the way down, unitary origins or not.
Yeah, he's quite dark. But I think his account, when read secularly is quite coherent. But the problem of how out of one many arise, remains, no matter who espouses it.
As to what happen in death, I don't think Mainlander's is any more coherent than Schopenhauer. Once one tries to say that death is a long sleep or terrible isolation or whatever, it becomes kind of empty talk, imo. It's just whatever metaphor you prefer to use.
I dont think he says that, but rather the absence of being. The whole project from BigBang onwards is moving towards non-being I think is the idea. Kind of like BigBang to Heat Death.
The conundrum there would be why individual nonbeing matters but if we take it that Will is our inner aspect, the every shard of the exploded god ceasing is I guess achieving that aim?
Interestingly by individualizing the perspectives thoroughly, it probably influenced Nietzsches later perspectivism, not that I much care for Nietzsches will to power crap.
I answered your objection. If reason comes from will than reason can NOT give an account of Will as you try to do. Reason inly knows reason. What is prior to reasoning is beyond reasoning.
It's something like that, I've yet to read the official English translation, which is allegedly coming out this year.
As I understand it's "as if" (and it's very important to keep this in mind) God killed himself, creating the universe and life being as it were, his remains, going on to eventual total extinction. Which is fine for his metaphysics.
But for our concerns about metaphysics here, I don't see a practical difference between non-being and non-being, in that, prior to us arising, we were part of the process that made up "God's corpse" as it were.
We weren't alive and are now alive by accident. And death will be the same, I think. He was more or less correct in describing something like the Big Bang, but what happens after, we do not know. Maybe it's the complete cessation of all activity, maybe we contract back again to another Big Bang, maybe there are more universes. We have no idea.
Funny that you mention Nietzsche, in some other places I go to, he so popular. Never really got his popularity, aside his good prose.
Hey sorry if I was harsh earlier.. but could you quote some specific things I said so I can reference that? Otherwise, I may think you are addressing something else. Also, it seems like you kind of gloss over what I am saying for a general reply when you don't quote specific text.
Ok, so that is great, but that is not my question. That is to say, to posit that we reason is a given. To posit that there is Will is the thing to be explained. However, my question was more about to why Will has to have a multiplicity.
Will wills, yes. However, why is it that entailed in willing is this superstructure of the PSR, objects, space/time/causality as this aspect of Representation?
I think 'theisitic' is the wrong term. Certainly, many a Christian critic of Schopenhauer would agree with his own self-professed atheism. If, as both Schopenhauer and the other sources say, insight into the One is only attained through a kind of ecstatic intuition, then that is something other than 'theistic speculation' (and indeed later chapters in Schopenhauer's Compass explore the inherent tension between his kind of pantheist mysticism and religious orthodoxy). The question of how and why 'the One' has become 'the Many' is indeed the central issue of all ancient and classical metaphysics, but I can't see how the various interpretations of those ideas culminate in 'mere assertion', even while acknowledging that I myself only have a very hazy understanding of the matter (although I am still continuing to educate myself in it.)
Would I be correct in surmising that your original interest in Schopenhauer was motivated by your oft-stated antinatalism, on the grounds that his pessimistic philosophy provides support for such views? And that digging deeper into what he said, finding ideas that seem to have religious implications undermines that interpretation?
Quoting schopenhauer1
There's a current title, The One: How an Ancient Idea holds the Future of Physics, Heinrich Pas. I dipped into it, but my reading list is already unmanageable. But suffice to say, the basic idea lives on.
By 'theistic' I mean some sort of logos/reason/desire for it. What I was getting at is Schop seems to have painted himself in a corner. It is "blind Will" but "blind Will", dagnabit, just so happens produce the exact Representation that creates individuation. It just "does", right? Well, look at that, Will "just so happened" to create this complicated system out of its blind willing nature. Do you see what I'm getting at.. It almost certainly leads to a quasi-theological understanding. Will then is blind, but it's blind and needs its playground (representation). All of a sudden you have a reason, a story, a myth, what have you. However, that's a reason. He then is stuck on these ideas of Platonic Forms by way of the influences that book nicely lays out (Schelling, Bohme, Neoplatonics, and the rest). That is to say, he has a ready-made metaphysics that is in need of a new home.
Quoting Quixodian
I think this is a distraction to the debate at hand. I thought his notions of suffering, and striving were very accurate. That is say, his Eastern notion of suffering of being always dissatisfied. This seems to characterize the human animal. One doesn't need the architectonics for this conclusion to be true though. One doesn't need to believe in the Platonic Forms, or in a metaphysical Will, or even the transcendental nature of time/space/causality. However, even so, I do entertain his ideas with the principle of charity as I think he had a great understanding of the nature of being (a human and animal), and think he had inventive ways of answering questions.
I see your point, and yes it does do that. Maybe the brush that Schopenhauer paints himself into the corner with might actually be his atheism?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I would prefer 'the human condition'. ;-)
What multiplicity? Schop says multiplicity is one because Will is one and Representation is Will. Will is not "a being" so to speak. Will is unity indivisible, without separation. For concepts alone, it is not-Will. Concepts stop in order to let in Will, "the Beloved" as mystics call it
Quoting schopenhauer1
There is no reason for the world. It just happened says Schopenhauer. How did it happen? But what happen? There is no multiplicity because Will is all and Will is one. So nothing has happened. What you see is Maya
We see animals treating tress differently than the ground; for example, we see birds perching in trees, goannas climbing trees to escape from us, and countless other examples showing that animals perceive the world divided up roughly the same as we do, and of course animals appear to be percipients just as we are, so we imagine they must see the world as divided up in ways that have nothing to do with them.
For me the idea that the world is divided the way it is into the countless organisms, processes and relations which reliably reveal themselves to our observations merely on account of human consciousness stretches credulity. To me, the mystery is as to what that diverse world is in itself; I don't even consider what to me seems the most implausible possibility that it is all a human production.
Individuality and identity have their issues, to be sure. I tend to think of individuation as something real that forces itself onto our attention, and identity as just a kind of placeholder that signifies that individuals can be identified on account of their differences. No two things in the world are exactly the same. Individual things are perhaps never the same from one moment to the next, some more obviously different through time than others, of course. The hill near my house, covered with tall eucalypts looks the same from day to day, but if I cast my thoughts back a few years I remember the trees were much shorter (Flooded gums grow 3-4 meters a year).
That's because your thinking is mired in human exceptionalism. This kind of thinking brought us to the dire situation regarding the environment we find ourselves in today.
Quoting Janus
I wouldn't be so quick to condemn this thinking. Humans do have obvious differences that make a difference. We seem to be a largely cultural animal which internalize the cultural ideas with various degrees of freedom, using our individual personality-propensities and decisions to "get stuff done".
There must be a difference a kind of mind that has conceptual-linguistic-based thoughts versus ones that do not. That must count for something.
But we are like other animals in that we mostly care about only our own kind and a few other species that are useful to us (and we often treat those animals appallingly), Our recursive thinking should have enabled us to see past that limited focus, and in fact arguably did in hunter/gatherer times. Throughout most of post-agricultural history we have been too busy rationalizing our desires to take what we want without regard for the consequences. That is changing today in some quarters, but it may well be too little too late.
But you are hitting on a most interesting point, often overlooked. What you say about animals is indeed correct. It raises the same issue, the animal is doing the individuating (in so far are we are able to discern what they do), meaning, it's an internal mechanism of the creature. And I think this generalizes to all creatures, that have a minimum level of experience (above a slug, for instance).
Quoting Janus
I just don't see an alternative, with the only exception, is to give cognition to the world, a kind of panpsychism.
Quoting Janus
This is another mystery to me, the lack of identical aspects to object in the world. This changes in the micro-physical world, but that's virtually alien to lived experience.
Interesting, we seem to have different starting conditions, but agree on similar conclusion.
So I am at a loss of how you want to go ahead communicating, as you seem to start from the end of the conversation. So let's start over. Let's start from this post here and you can let me know
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/831351
Quoting Gregory
Don't quote this, but quote the comment above. However, to add to what you said here, my comment above is about whence Maya? If all is Will, why the Representation? That is why I said it was asserted (hint: read comment above and reply to specific text in that).
Yes, I would say that Zapffe captures this paradox of self-awareness the best:
And directly here:
That is to say, we done fuckd it up. It's too late for us. Secondary consciousness forbids the return to Eden. All these religious attempts at ecstasy, or calm, or peace, or serenity in vain. All seeking what is genetically not in our cards.
For me this raises the question as to whether the embodiment of an animal is not already the beginning of individuation. There seems to be the natural boundary determined by bodily sensation, between me and not me.
As to the things in the environment they affect the body differently pre-cognitively it would seem such as, for example, one appears as a tree and another a waterfall. One I can move around, remove branches and leaves from, maybe use its bark, even cut it down and burn it, the other I can go under and be washed, or watch the sunlight sparkling on the water and feel the fine mist of water vapour on my skin and so on. So, it seems to me that thgere is no arbitrariness in the ways we come to differentiate the things in the environment, they all have real pre-cognitive affactes on the body, on the skin, on the nerves, it seems.
Quoting Manuel
Our understanding of the microphysical seems to show us that things are not merely as they appear. But then the micro-physical itself is another, sensorially augmented, appearance. It's truly a mystery.
We do seem to agree, even if we took different paths to get there.
The difference between them and Schopenhauer is that his philosophy is actually soteriological - there is a possible escape from the futility of existence. Still reckon that's the aspect of his thinking you can't accept.
Quoting Janus
Totally with you on that. The appearance of the first organisms is the appearance of intentionality and the first glimmer of consciousness. The difference for h. sapiens is that we are aware of our existence in a way that animals are not, and it's a difference that makes a huge difference.
For sure a huge difference, but not only, or even predominately, in a good way. You can say we are higher than the other animals because we can do things which they cannot even imagine, but we are also lower than the other animals because we cannot, taken as a collective, live harmoniously with them or even with each other.
We can think in the abstract, and that has produced great intellectual achievements, and works in the arts, but it has also produced horrors, nightmares. We cannot accept our mortality and that has produced vain dreams of eternal life and paradise, while we cannot even be sensible enough to be happy on Earth during our brief existence between two nothingnesses.
Nice characterization there.. Using your abstracting skills. I would simply add that there is no reason to create the stuff between the two nothingnesses. Anytime we force someone else's hand, it's a political move. What is the motive behind throwing more people into the world? We want someone else to go through the disturbing episode. After just extolling our abstraction abilities, you cannot hide behind "instinct" for why. We clearly can do the opposite of our initial desires. We do it all the time. If you say it is so that they can experience the joy that you sometimes feel, that is ignoring the logical other side of life. That is becoming the judge and executioner for someone else, making it their burden. And so the disturbing episodes continue.
All we have left is snide remarks about how depressives aren't wanted here and to go away. But then Ligotti had the delightful observation of optimistic responses here in possibly the most pessimistic thing ever written (notice I said pessimistic, not necessarily gruesome:
Best quote on this is succinct though:
So yeah, any gaslight-y snide answer to the Pessimist has been noted and lampooned, so you can stop before you start :wink:.
If you weren't going to give a pat optimistic snide remark towards the pessimistic stance, carry on and ignore.
Indeed, ironically, I think Schopenhauer too optimistic. There is no blissful escape. But more interestingly, the fact that there are schools of thought regarding "escaping from life's suffering/Suffering (western/Eastern sense of the word), is telling about life in the first place and should be a warning about putting more people into it in the first place. In other words, the only logical outcome are the monks and ascetic practice of no procreation. That's it. Everything else is dealing with the already existing fallout. Don't drop the bomb rather than having to figure out how to live with the radiation.
If I have a soteriological inclination, I think it would be more in line with Hartmann's:
That is to say, only the right understanding is possible. I can only go back to Zapffe again, for what we tend to do when we get too close to this understanding:
That is to say, if we are not defending our projects with anchoring mechanisms like "Tradition, Pursuit of Happiness/Pleasure, Science, Progress, Family, Country", we are distracting with the little things "hobbies, gardening, travel". And if we are not lucky enough to have gotten at these stages of "Maslow's Hierarchy", safety, security, and mere physiological survival.
If someone adds a chemical solution to what we call a river, it hardens and if I paint yellow lines on it, it becomes a road - and can be used as such. The change is chemically trivial, yet our conception radically alters, notice that in this case, we wouldn't perceive this hardened thing to be discontinuous from the surrounding terrain.
And if you put a concrete wall in front of the waterfall, it becomes a dam of sorts.
These small changes raise questions about how we individuate. Where I cannot find a fault in this, is in mathematics, it seems necessary.
It's not arbitrary, you are correct, it's subtle and delicate. Small changes drastically change how we conceptualize items as being one or many (is a tree one thing, or many?, etc.)
Quoting Janus
100% agree. It makes no sense as to how these microphysical things could lead to anything really...
Quoting schopenhauer1
When I said this:
Quoting Janus
I was not aiming for a pessimistic characterization of human life in toto, but rather in general. I think some individuals can accept their mortality and find peace and be sensible enough to be overall happy with their life onon Earth; I know I am.
Others are able to have unshakeable faith in eternal life, or in the possibility of progress towards enlightenment. I don't claim those things can be logically or empirically justified, but that doesn't seem to matter to some. Others, perhaps a majority, don't seem to be interested in thinking about such things at all. I don't draw any conclusions or make any judgements about such matters: I am agnostic.
I've told you before that I have never had a desire to reproduce, but I don't sit in judgement on those who do. I think the world is over-populated, but I don't see that as being anyone's fault. Many people mindlessly reproduce, and the world would arguably be a better place if all people reproduced mindfully, or even better satisfied their desire for children by adopting from poorer nations (if only the governments would make this much easier than it currently seems to be from what I've heard and read). Like everything in human life, it's a complex issue, involving many competing interests.
Quoting Manuel
I think the predominate view is that a tree is a single organism with many parts, and those parts have further parts and so on, but the tree is nonetheless a self-organizing whole; and that seems to make most sense to me.
The boundaries of what we call "inanimate entities", such as oceans, mountains, deserts and rivers are much less clearly defined, but from that it doesn't follow that those categories are purely arbitrary or even purely constructed in terms of human interest, in my view.
Quoting Manuel
:up:
But theres no use denying the fact that we exist in the first place. A coherent response to the human condition amounts to more than regret for being part of it. As I said before, it could be said that Schopenhauer and others recognise the cogency of the first noble truth, that to live is to suffer, but dont grasp the further truth, that there is an end to suffering. In the parable of the snake, the Buddha says that grasping his teaching correctly is like taking hold of a snake the right way, otherwise it will turn and kill you.
I know the question I have for Schopenhauer - if will is blind, and the origin of everything, then how to account for mind? In Neoplatonism, nous is seen as a universal, but Schopenhauer seems to expunge it of actual intelligence, leaving only striving or energy. So where in his scheme to mind/nous/intelligence originate?
Lame-duck sauce response, but at least it's not snide. That is to say, it really didn't address much of what I wrote.
Quoting Janus
Eek. You think I am simply "judging people" like procreation is a fashion trend that I find repulsive? You negate the very reason for the judgement (and not the 'judging'- there is a difference).
Oddly enough, isn't that the kind of thing the ascetics question? Bundle theory and all that.
Quoting Quixodian
Communal catharsis. It's right understanding.
Quoting Quixodian
Yep. My question too.
That which I didn't address was off-topic in this thread, and I have no interest in going over your anti-natalism arguments again.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Did I say you are judging people? I understand you are against procreation, and you are entitled to your opinion. I know all the arguments, and I am not convinced by them. Not everyone must think as you do.
It's very much on topic. Here were the steps of this conversation. Schopenhauer's Thing Itself > Escape from it possible? (Quixodian yes/ schopenhaer1 no) > If we can't escape then don't start in the first place. Wasn't far off really but a dialectical conversation that leads to ethics. Conversations aren't completely static and Schop's Thing-Itself bereft of Pessimism would be completely off.
Quoting Janus
You said, Quoting Janus
Quoting schopenhauer1
Does that sentence state that you sit in judgement on procreators? Do you sit in judgement on them?
More precisely, it was questioning if the Thing Itself can be referred to as a referent, as if it was a phenomenal thing. That being said, you can't just talk about this stuff in isolation. Schop's ideas were a system infused with pessimism. The Thing Itself is ultimately striving nature of existence and if you weren't following the whole thread, I can see how you would think it was out of left field, but it comes more from my conversation with Quixodian. I think I picked up on something you said and kind of wrapped you up in that conversation too.. So, I can see your confusion perhaps. I invite you to look back at the full conversation I was having in the thread though if you did want to meet me back here, which I am sure you are not inclined to do, so carry on.
Quoting Janus
It seemed to imply you don't judge [s]procreation,[/s] people, but I do.. Like I was judging someone's clothes or trying to make someone feel bad or something else of a negative connotation of how "judging others" is used.
I see what youre getting at, but the reality of there being an enduring self is not the same as reality of the plight of existence, even if theyre closely intertwined. (That is one of the main preoccupations of the Buddhist/Hindu dialectic.) The next chapter (6) of Schopenhauers Compass is about the genesis of the edition of the Upani?ads that he had access to, which was a compendium put together by the brother of the Prince who had the Taj Mahal built (if memory serves). The compendium contained additions and interpolations by the translator from a variety of sources (including Yog?c?ra Buddhism). In any case, the key point as always is that the illusory realm of m?y? is seen through by the liberated mukti.
The OP says nothing about Schopenhauer's pessimism. The fact that Schopenhauer thinks we can know something about the thing in itself by introspection, that it is blind will or striving, says nothing at all about whether the thing in itself is good, bad or neutral.
Nietzsche accepted the will but for him it is a good thing, the source of everything truly beautiful, interesting and alive.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I know you judge procreation, I don't know if you judge people for procreating. I imagine you must judge that they are at least ignorant if not culpable. I should have been clearer and added that I judge neither procreation nor procreators, beyond thinking that it is not such a good idea when the world is already over-populated. I certainly don't see life as an inherent negative, as you apparently do. All I can think about that is that your experience must be very different than mine. I love life and have never regreted being born. If I could choose to come back again and again I would.
If we discussed Kant's notion of Transcendental Idealism and then I ventured into his ideas that surround that, I believe I would be justified.
If we discussed Schop's notion of "thing in itself" and we discussed what that meant for Schopenhauer we would be justified. It means for him, a blind striving Will. And it was discussed at length as to how Will can form Representation and Objects and the PSR. How is All Will if Will is also Representation? Whence this Representation? That was all discussed previously and more than tangentially touch on the idea of Thing Itself and how it becomes "known to itself" (through Representation). So I would kindly just end this little line of bullshit because it is fruitless to the topic. I get it, you don't want to talk about other stuff related to Schop's idea of Will and my general conclusions from his ideas etc. etc.. GOT IT! So you can drop it if you want as I don't care to discuss why were are discussing what we are discussing and the boundaries of if we can or cannot discuss what we are discussing. I find that pedantic and exhausting.
Quoting Janus
But you don't choose, and you can't. And if you didn't come back, no one would lose out. There is no ghost version that is deprived or in regret or is distraught over non-spilled milk.
If suffering counts for anything, it is not up to us to determine if other people should be burdened with it. And on and on. You know the arguments, you said. They have nothing to do with personal preferences. Personal preferences should not be the determinate for what others should have to endure. If I like football, that doesn't mean football players should be forced to play so I can be entertained.
Yes that does seem to be the thrust of Schop's idea of the ascetic in book 4.
Good point, but I get stuck on "truly is" because either Will is magically asserted or Maya is magically asserted. However, we "know" Maya (e.g. the cogito).
Here is a question.. What does it even mean once you are enlightened? How can you say that it is anything but a dispositional state (tranquility/calmness)? But Buddha felt pain after his enlightenment. You can say that he experienced some sort of ego-death. He no longer cared if he got something or didn't get something, etc. Besides that being unproven (that he truly achieved that throughout his post-enlightenment), nothing can be proved about that state of affairs other than it is a state of affairs about someone in the world. That this meant something like a mystical/spiritual thing, can always be questioned and never proven. Why is that even attached to it other than cultural traditions of the Vedic/Hindu contingent traditions from which it sprang. Perhaps Greeks had a similar notion, maybe even some sort of Indo origin to both of them that was in the cultural substrate. Perhaps it evolved in both cultures convergently like a bat and a bird evolved wings, but not from the same origin.
Sure, but presuming holism the thing in itself would presumably be the same as things in themselves, the world in itself or reality in itself.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't think so. Kant was no anti-natalist afaik (although he failed to procreate afaik). I see Kant's project as determining the limits of reason to make way for faith. he didn't want to, couldn't, say what the thing in itself is.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I wonder how many people see life as something to be endured as opposed to something to be enjoyed, and birth as being a gift rather than a burden. Anyway, it has everything to do with personal preferences, or if nothing to do with personal preference then people will do as they are determined to do and that's the end of it, and I am not going to be drawn any further into these futile under-determined arguments.
I just find this to be pretty uninteresting. "There is no why". The end. It just doesn't have the philosophical heft to explain the systems it relies upon. That is to say, how is it that Will "objectifies" itself? What can that mean if all is a unitary one? Why objectification from a unitary being? Why space/time, etc? Whether it's illusory or not, it's still something that is there in the picture.
No I wasn't talking directly about Kant, I was using that as analogy of what I was doing with Schopenhauer.. I was saying that my discussion was fair game regarding the Thing Itself as Schopenhauer saw. If this was a discussion about Kant's Transcendental Idealism, and I touched upon various topics surrounding that, it would be analogous to discussing Schopenhauer's Will and Thing Itself and various topics surrounding that. I was not trying to actually discuss Kant's Transcendental Idealism.
Quoting Janus
You make an argument and then walk away. Then don't make the argument. don't argue about it. Let it go as I was trying to do.. but you went on despite saying you don't want to...
So I will respond in kind as I am not going to let wrong-headedness just slip by in a reply to my statement. And you called it "under-determined" which of course will drag this argument further being you tried to negatively characterize it, so that's on you for throwing the punches.....I have no sympathy for you now regarding this discussion and you can't play the "I'm a victim of your moralizing" when you do shit like that. If you are going to metaphorically punch someone in the face, get ready for a counter-punch.
People are going to do what they decide to do. Determined is a loaded word and is smuggled in via debates about free will. Such meta-ethics doesn't need to be brought in. People have reasons, and sometimes "accidents" (or "don't care about the consequences" which is still a stance) for why they procreate or not procreate. To play stupid and pretend that no one has reasons for anything and it's all blind robots is more than wrong, it's intellectually dishonest.
As to your idea of "it has everything to do with preferences", you are pretending that the issue of whether or not other people should be born is not a moral issue at all. It's just another action in the world. Well many behaviors have a moral element to them and this is one of them. Life entails suffering/Suffering (western/Eastern notions of), and this would be something a person born would have to deal with. Is it okay to cause this for another person to deal with? You can't hide behind "good experiences". No one is denying that. It is only questioning whether causing the conditions for negative experiences is a morally justified action.
It's not about condemning or judging people. It's about reasoning about if we should impose suffering onto others which seems to violate rules of non-malfeasance, and autonomy when carried out.
It can be validated first person. The stages and states of realization can be verified inter-subjectively. The Eastern Gatehouse sutta is a dialogue between Buddha and Sariputta about the Deathless and its attainment - that it can be seen and known directly but that until it is seen thus it has to be taken on faith. But in western culture, a hard and fast division has emerged between what is categorized as faith and what is categorized as scientific knowledge. Theres nothing corresponding to jñ?na in our lexicon, so all that can be said (usually dismissively) is that its something spiritual or mystical.
I find the idea of will instead of substance causing reality very interesting because it's so abstract
What do you think about "something from nothing" in terms of physics?
The way I look at there is direct observation which can be personally inter-experentially and publicly intersubjectevly confirmed. such as there is a tree next to the end of the shed, water boils at 100 degrees C, it is raining here and now and countless other examples of observation of the phenomenal world which yield all our discursive or propositional knowledge.
Then there is mathematics and logic.
Then there are beliefs about what cannot be confirmed by observation, mathematics or logic; that is those things we take just on faith.
Then there are altered states of consciousness which may be temporary or permanent. I don't seee how a claim that either faith or altered states of consciousness yield discursive or propositional knowledge can be justified. I've never seen any argument that could convince me of that. On the other hand although they cannot be classed as forms of "knowing that", they could be classed as knowledge in the sense of "know-how".
Now, I could be convinced by my own experience that such states do yield quasi-discursive knowledge, in the sense of my own discourse just with myself, but how could I ever demonstrate that to another who was not already convinced of the same? And how could I ever be sure, as opposed to merely feeling sure, that I was not deceiving myself?
All that said I have faith in certain "intimations" I have gained from such altered states, and form creative work, but I find I cannot clearly articulate them, and I would never count the fact of my having such intimations as justification for anyone else to believe anything.
So when you say
Quoting Quixodian
I don't believe the kind of inter-subjective verification at work in such contexts is in the same class as the inter-subjective verification that operates in empirical observations, mathematical proofs and logic, because the latter kind of verification is such that it will definitely convince any suitably unbiased and competent agent, and the competency itself can also be publicly demonstrated. The same lack of public demonstrability applies to aesthetics; it can never be definitively shown that a creative work is great for example.
Which is what is generally regarded as empiricism. You commonly cite that position in these arguments, yet when you're challenged on it, you deny it:
Quoting Janus
You're appealing to sense-experience, empirical observation, or whatever you want to call it. At least be clear about that.
Quoting Janus
But if you associate 'taking on faith' with religion, then you fall back on the faith/reason dichotomy which is writ large in our culture and which I say which leads to stereotyping. I think the way you're evaluating it is like this: that Buddhism is a religion; religion is not something that can be validated empirically; therefore it's a matter of faith.
But there are all kinds of things we know, without knowing precisely how we know them, or being able to demonstrate them empirically. Michael Polanyi, philosopher of science, spent his career teasing out such implicit or tacit knowledge - things that you know which cannot be easily explained because it's tied to your way of being in the world. For example, a skilled musician may have a deep understanding of how to play a complex piece of music which they can't explain, but only enact. Scientists have a great deal of performative knowledge and starting assumptions which are often not disclosed in their eventual writings. Much knowledge is rooted in our ability to recognize patterns, make judgments, and engage in practical activities without necessarily being able to provide a step-by-step, explicit account of how we do it. We often rely on tacit knowledge in everyday tasks without consciously thinking about it. Does all of that fall under the umbrella term of 'faith'? I think not. (Although, interestingly, one of the terms for spiritual practices in the Eastern lexicon is 'bhavana', which means, literally, 'becoming' - something along the lines of 'habits becoming character', I think it means.)
Quoting Janus
That is the so-called 'public square of the secular state'. It has its own criteria for what constitutes knowledge, but there are also historical and social factors behind that, in the vexed relationship between religion and science in Western culture. The reason/faith dichotomy is a strong undercurrent in all these debates, we see it here every day. But there are other domains of discourse - cultures which judge the matter by different standards, within which inter-subjective verification of such matters is intelligible. I'm not trying to persuade you to believe anything but trying to flush out the implicit basis, or maybe even bias, in such judgements. Notice how generally any assertion of 'higher knowledge' (jñ?na) is categorised as 'mystical' or 'spiritual', which kicks it into the long grass, so to speak. But really in those cultures to which it is endogenous, such an understanding is quite prosaic. There is a cultural milieu in which it is intelligible, navigable and communicable - precisely what our culture is lacking.
I don't believe you have one to mount, or you would have done so by now...it's been years...
Quoting Quixodian
LOL, I was simply outlining the different kinds of knowledge as I see them. If you think that picture is wrong, you are free to critique it.
Quoting Quixodian
I am not appealing to anything, rather I'm just saying that what is usually counted as knowable in the intersubjective sense is what is confirmable by publicly available observations, mathematics or logic. If you can come up with another category of knowledge that is definitely intersubjectively confirmable then present the case for it or admit you cannot.
For example, you apparently think enlightenment is intersubjectively confirmable: well, a great number of people thought and still think Osho was enlightened, but I bet you think he was a fraud. How do you establish the truth in cases like that, eh? How do you know Gotama was enlightened? The authority of tradition?
Quoting Quixodian
So, you are saying that because stereotyping is socially undesirable, assuming for the sake of the argument that the faith/reason dichotomy does lead to it, that we should not accept any distinction between faith and reason?
In any case I see the dichotomy as being between belief and knowledge, not faith and reason. belief operates as much in science as anywhere else, or at least provisionally accepted hypotheses do. When we can directly observe something, prove it mathematically or logically, then we know it, all the rest is provisional acceptance or committed acceptance (faith).
Quoting Quixodian
I have in my last post acknowledged the difference between knowing how and knowing that, as I have done many times on these forums, so this is a strawman. If musicians cannot explain how they are able to play complex pieces of music, then it is precisely "knowing that" that is lacking. They can't explain it, but they can do it. It is the same with altered states of consciousness; how they are possible, metaphysically speaking, what the implications of them are, is not known, but how to attain them may be.
Quoting Quixodian
Other cultures do have different understandings of what constitutes knowledge. For example, the Chinese traditionally believed that acupuncture works by dissolving blockages in the channels, called meridians, through which the vital energy, called Ch'i was believed to flow. None of this is intersubjectively confirmable; you either believe or you don't, or you reserve judgement because there is no evidence for it either way; how acupuncture really works is not known. On the other hand, the flow of blood through veins and arteries or lymph through the lymphatic system can be confirmed by observation; how it works is known.
So, the fact that other cultures have their different faiths and beliefs does not entail that those faiths and beliefs are true or not true. We simply don't and cannot know, because they are not susceptible of publicly available evidence.
I'm not saying it is wrong for people to believe in Ch'i; if it feels right to them then I see no problem with it, but intellectual honesty demands that it be acknowledged that the belief is not grounded on empirical evidence, mathematics or logic, the only methods we have for intersubjective demonstration or proof.
You seem to want to have your cake and eat it too.
.
Even if my argument were empiricist, it still warrants a decent counter-argument; mere dismissal by fiat or characterization does not amount to participating in discussion. Critique my arguments as hard as you like, if you come up with a decent critique; I might learn something. A disappointing response, as usual!
Quoting Janus
You're appealing to empiricism, even if you say you're not. It is not an accusation, it's a description.
Quoting Janus
Consider the provenance of the word 'enlightenment' that is used in respect of Eastern religious practices. It had its origin with a British translator of Buddhist texts, who used it to translate the term 'bodhi', motivated by his belief that Pali Buddhism was compatible with the outlook of the European Enlightenment. He was late Victorian, and they had the belief back then that Buddhism was a 'scientific religion', which I don't think is held any more. I suppose it is not necessarily a poor choice of words, but it has unfortunately become somewhat commoditized, as something to buy, sell, or somehow get, which plays right into consumer economics. I perfectly agree that as a consequence, there are lot of bogus gurus and enlightenment scams in the marketplace. There are many traps, pitfalls and delusions associated with the entire quest. But your objection simply reinforces what I said about stereotyping, about your customary view of anything you categorise under that umbrella. As the aphorism has it, there would be no fool's gold if there were no actual gold.
Quoting Janus
It's nevertheless claimable under Medicare.
Quoting Janus
But the subject can be and has been rigourously investigated, so there are those who can and do know. There's a 'mindfulness training centre' at Oxford, for heaven's sake. This is an epistemological question - the question of whether the subject has a factual core, or whether it's simply conjecture, custom, or pious belief.
Quoting Janus
Intellectual honesty demands no such thing. Or maybe it requires acknowledgement that this assertion is also culturally-situated and conditioned. It is what our culture takes as a criterion for 'valid knowledge' - as I already said. There are hundreds, or is it thousands, of generations of devotees and disciples across many cultures who have practiced these paths and discipines, producing works of sacred literature and art. These can be studied, interpreted, practiced, and the results ascertained for oneself. One of the attributes of Buddhist praxis is 'ehi-passiko', which means, basically, 'come and see for yourself'. Although, of course, that's all just religion....
I don't think much of it. There have been ideas from people like Lawrence Krauss'A Universe from Nothing that posits just that. I think it's plausible, but look at the explanation:
Quoting NPR Interview with Lawrence Krauss
I'm not sure if that really is in favor of anything like Will being omnipresent.
"Appealing" is an attitude; don't presume to tell me what I'm appealing to.
Quoting Quixodian
The provenance of the word, which I am amply familiar with, does not constitute an argument, nor is it relevant to what I've been saying.
Quoting Quixodian
Right, so how do you know which is fake and which is real? And even if you believe that you do know, how can you demonstrate to others that you do know? You can't, therwise you would, and that's the point I'm making. If you know some mathematical or logical truth, you can demonstrate it. If you have made some empirical observation, you can demonstrate it, but who is enlightened and who isn't, just like which creative works are great and which are not, cannot be definitively demonstrated, and that's all I've been trying to get you to see, or if think it is wrong to make an actual argument that sets out just why you believe it is wrong. that demonstrates it to be wrong.
Quoting Quixodian
I know that, but it is irrelevant. We know how western medicine works, or at least we have very good theories grounded in observation and experiment. The same cannot be said about acupuncture, which is not to say it doesn't work. I don't know whether it works or not, do you?
Quoting Quixodian
What are seeking to appeal to here? Authority? Or tradition? Sure, it's a kind of epistemological question, but it's also a semantic question because the referents of "subject", "factual", "core" are not clear in this context. So, I'm not even sure what you think the question means.
Quoting Quixodian
No, if you cannot say how the belief in Ch'i is grounded in empirical evidence, mathematics or logic, then you should admit that. If it is only grounded in intuition, it may or may not be true, but how would you go about determining that, or demonstrating its truth or falsity? That is what you need to show.
I don't need to 'show' anything, especially as your only interest is polemical. I should have kept mum the first time around.
Do you know the well-known story of David Albert's scathing review of Universe from Nothing and what happened afterwards? Apparently Krauss was absolutely enraged by it and fired off angry missives to the editors, before being gently advised by some of his professional peers to cool it. The offending paragraph:
[quote=David Albert]The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which arent, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.[/quote]
Oh, and the closing para was pretty good, too (in light of the fact that Krauss' book was hailed a 'hammer-blow against Religion' by none other than Richard Dawkins):
I tried, no joy. Past a certain point it becomes futile. Life's short, let's move on. Intellectual honesty demands that valid knowledge be what I declare it to be :roll:
The poster asked if I was aware of something from nothing in physics and I gave him the main example I knew from the popular science book. Yes, I am aware of the scientism of many scientists. The context of the debate often revolves around the use of words and the misguided acknowledgment of what these terms mean for each side.
For physicists, "nothing" has a different connotation than the classic philosophical notions of nothing. It just needs zero energy to be considered "nothing" in physics I guess. And of course, that is unsatisfying in a philosophical sense that the theoretical principles and laws and fields that underlie this "nothing" still need to be accounted for.
This looks to be a decent explanation of "nothing" in physics.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-physics-of-nothing-underlies-everything-20220809/#:~:text=Quantum%20Nothingness&text=In%20classical%20physics%2C%20a%20field's,%E2%80%9CNothing%20is%20happening.%E2%80%9D
What Krauss provided was a modern physical description of creation. Creation is seen as something supernatural in the religions. But what do they mean when they say God has the "power" to create from nothing. What does power mean but "from itself". But what is God? The MIND asks this. Or maybe this God can't produce from himself because he can not be imitated. This is the God that the atheists fight against. Then this God's action of creation was truly magic
I see these are words, but they don't mean much. I'm in a conversation with @frank about language use, and this is an example of a language game where terms are so vague that we are going to keep talking over each other.
I think 's post was accurate. You seem to be taking a least-common-denominator approach. "If the hoi polloi cannot verify a claim, then it doesn't possess intersubjective agreement."
For example, we could limit intersubjective agreement to empirical realities that can be seen and touched (by even a 5 year-old). I don't think anyone would object to the claim that such realities are objects of intersubjective agreement, but there are other intersubjective domains that transcend the capacity of 5 year-olds. Mathematics and physics are two that come to mind.
Now when the Buddha exposits the different forms of jñ?na and claims that they are accessible, he is not saying that they are accessible to the hoi polloi in their current state. Just as geometry is not accessible to the 5 year-old and differential equations are not accessible to the average adult, so too the states that Quixodian was referring to are not accessible to the average person. So what? What does this have to do with intersubjective verification?
Note too, that faith is the reason the 5 year-old believes in geometry and the average adult believes in calculus. The vast majority of our scientific knowledge and beliefs are faith-based. The percentage of people who have first-hand knowledge or understanding of any given scientific theory is slim to none, and yet these same people will often know the names and the gist of these theories and will assent to them as being true.
I can see this argument. Nevertheless, unlike faith based entities (such as gods), there is evidence available for scientific knowledge which people who have education can access and verify and demonstrate to work. I suspect that aligning this testable, demonstrable, if arcane knowledge with faith can lead to conceptual problems elsewhere. Thoughts?
When I catch a plane, a Christian apologist might argue that I have faith the plane will fly. It's true I know little about the engineering or piloting component of flight. However I would say this is having a reasonable confidence the plane will fly. I know planes fly. The evidence is overwhelming that most do so safely. I know there are engineers and pilots and that they have training etc. I don't see this as a matter of faith.
I haven't said there is no intersubjective agreement amongst the religious faithful, I have said there is no definitive intersubjective testability when it comes to religious or metaphysical claims, and I include in that all metaphysical claims including materialism.
My argument is that the only definitive intersubjective testability we have of human knowledge is in relation to empirical observations, mathematical results and logic. This has nothing at all to do with the "hoi polloi".
Also, I don't claim that scientific theories, as opposed to observations, are definitively testable beyond determining whether what they predict is observed. I don't claim that if a scientific theory is predictively accurate that this proves that it is true in any absolute sense.
It is clear how phenomenal observations can be confirmed, how mathematical results can be rigorously tested and how logical claims can be definitively assessed as to their validity (not truth, mind). If you want to claim that it is possible to definitively determine whether or not Osho or the Buddha were enlightened, or whether there is a God or resurrection or karma or rebirth, or whether certain creative works are great and others not, then please present your case.
No problem! This is such a recurring difficulty in our scientific culture that I was sure I would get pulled into these sorts of discussions eventually. :razz:
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Quixodian's post was about Buddhism, not Christianity, and I think Buddhism provides the easier case. As far as the Buddha is concerned, 'the deathless' can be seen and known by those who have been properly initiated, just as is the case with scientific knowledge. So I think there is parity here. I grant that your belief that planes fly is not a matter of faith, but of knowledge. But I am not going to enter into the question of Christian faith at this point, in large part because I will be out for the next four or five days.
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Quoting Janus
It has everything to do with the hoi polloi. When you say that a scientific claim is testable you mean that you would subject it to the scientific expert for confirmation. You don't mean that you would find the average guy on the street and ask him if it is true. Yet when it comes to the Buddha's claim you are apparently content with the average guy on the street.
Much of it will come down to this claim of yours:
Quoting Janus
As Quixodian has pointed out, this sort of claim is circular. It is only demonstrable to those with the relevant presuppositions and training, and whether such presuppositions and training count as competence merely depends on who you ask.
If you are concerned with intersubjective agreement, then there can be little question that there is significant intersubjective agreement among Buddhists about the various states of consciousness, and that this is based on independent 'experimentation'. Or in other words, I don't think you will be able to sustain a coherent account of your, "definitive intersubjective testability." What you are reaching for is something beyond intersubjectivity.
While I think this is largely true is it not problematic? Clearly presuppositions are shared by everyone from Nazi's to Jehovah's Witnesses. Are all presuppositions equal just because they may be believed in with equal confidence?
Quoting Tom Storm
That, again, this is based on a culturally-conditioned or stereotyped depiction of what such claims entail. Firstly, in current science, there are many huge interpretive conundrums, for instance the debates about string theory and the multiverse, and whether theories of same ought to be testable in principle. Then there's all the many debates about interpretations of physics, which I won't open up here other than by way of mention.
There is a kind of 'secular consensus' as to what amounts to common-sense knowledge, which underwrites a great deal of this commentary. What really irked me was the demand that 'intellectual honesty dictates' that I acknowledge that common-sense attitude as the arbiter for the truth or otherwise of Buddhist epistemology- exactly as @Leontiskos described. What came to mind is Heidegger's remarks about 'das mann'.
This has now drifted a long way from the intention of the OP, something for which I admit some responsibility. What actually caused me to venture into the field of the Buddhist epistemology was the discussion about the sense in which Schopenhauer's philosophy is 'soteriological', i.e. encompassing the possibility of release (mok?a, as it is called in the Upani?ad). To which the reply was
Quoting schopenhauer1
So basically, I am asking, 'says who?' The nihilistic philosophers that @schopenhauer1 quotes from would naturally say that, but then, they're nihilists! All they demonstrate is regret for having been born. So I brought up that discussion of 'the Deathless' in one of the Buddhist suttas (here, for those interested) to make the case for there being, actually, 'blissful escape' (although it sounds a rather facile way of putting it.)
No, they are not equal, but they are equally intersubjective. We have been talking about intersubjectivity, not knowledge, and I suspect that is because the parties involved are wary of making knowledge claims. The appeal to "competence" is likely a quasi-knowledge claim.
Agree.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, we seem to dip in and out of various epistemologies.
Quoting Quixodian
Sure. Aspects of science are also speculative and theoretical.
Quoting Quixodian
Got ya.
Scientific observations are really only augmented empirical observations. Even the "hoi polloi" know how to test claims like "it is raining" or "there is a tree growing three meters from the shed" or :"the surf today is bigger than it was yesterday" and even they can look up tabulated information to determine whether it is true that there is currently global warming. There are countless such truths about the world we share that even the poor moronic hoi polloi can test.
You cannot demonstrate that it is possible to see "the deathless". You might be one hundred percent convinced that you have seen it, just as I might be one hundred percent convinced I have seen a unicorn; my conviction is not intersubjective verification for anyone else that I have in fact seen it, even if there might be those of like mind who agree that I have.
So again this
Quoting Leontiskos
Is a strawman. I haven't claimed there is no intersubjective agreement and experimentation does not prove a metaphysical claim in the Buddhist context any more than it proves scientific theories in the context of science. That said, at least in science the results of predictions are publicly observable.
That altered states of consciousness happen and that they may sometimes be achievable via certain disciplines is not in question, but even if those states were reliably achievable that does not prove anything metaphysical and it is not even possible for anyone to know with certainty that any particular claim to have achieved such a state is even true; they might be lying about it.
This brings us back to the question as to how you would determine whether Osho was enlightened; there was enormous intersubjective agreement that he was and yet Quixodian thinks he was a charlatan. How does he know he is right, and all Osho's followers were wrong?
And now we come to the Buddha: how do we know he was enlightened when we don't even possess a single word written by him, and we don't know except via historical documents how much intersubjective agreement there was about his enlightenment when he was alive?
As I am the 'he' in question, I'll refer to my previous response. It's a fact that vast populations can become victims of delusion - witness the Trump cult. But the fact that there are such delusions doesn't mean that effective political leadership is not possible. The constant complaint 'well, all religions disagree with each other, how can they all be right?' likewise. Agree that today's world is confused, chaotic, and full of contradictions. But that is not a philosophical argument, again it's just an appeal to common sense.
To round off my thoughts, difficulties of epistemology lead people to fall back from talking about knowledge to talking about intersubjective agreement. But intersubjective agreement is a very weak criterion, and it does not satisfy the belief that some intersubjective agreements are better than others. The quality of intersubjective agreement, taken in itself, can only be a matter of quantity (i.e. how many people agree). Once we begin to vet the subjects, we have introduced a second notion (expertise) that really goes beyond the simple idea of intersubjective agreement.
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Quoting Janus
The intersubjective agreement will be wider when it comes to obvious realities that are immediately accessible to everyone. Are you saying anything more than this?
Quoting Janus
It proves that they exist and that they are achievable, which are metaphysical truths and are the point in question.
Quoting Janus
The subjects of your intersubjective agreements may all be lying too. Who cares? How does this cut against Buddhism any more than science?
You wish to talk about "certainty" but you won't venture beyond intersubjective agreement. Intersubjective agreement about a claim does not produce certainty about a claim. You continue to equivocate between intersubjective agreement and stronger claims, akin to knowledge.
Quoting Janus
No, we are talking about Quixodian's claim about the Eastern Gatehouse sutta (link). Maybe you were talking about Osho with someone else. I am not him, and I am not interested in ad hoc tangents. Let's stay on topic.
This would be rich material for its own thread. Perhaps when you get back. What we also need is someone properly steeped in post-structuralist thinking to unpack the intersubjective and the idea of knowledge and expertise.
Quoting Wayfarer
Noted. In my mind you were always Wayfarer... however I am partial to the novel Don Quixote.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, I am saying that some claims can be definitively confirmed by empirical observation and others cannot. That's really all I've been saying all along.
Quoting Leontiskos
I would not count that as a metaphysical truth, but as a phenomenological truth. Whatever the metaphysical implications of that truth are cannot be determined but remain purely a matter of faith.
And note I have not said I think people should not have faith, whether Christian, Buddhist or whatever, provided they acknowledge that what they have is faith not knowledge. I have my own articles of faith, which I don't share on here because I don't believe they are philosophically arguable. The problem with thinking that faith is knowledge is that it leads to fundamentalism and that can be very socially dangerous and detrimental.
Quoting Leontiskos
I do venture beyond intersubjective agreement in my own life. We can be certain of intersubjectvely testable claims, barring extreme skepticism, such claims constitute public knowledge. We can feel certain of what our own experience tells us, but what our own experience tells us is true is not knowledge in the intersubjective sense, it is merely personal conviction.
I haven't made up my own mind about whether Osho or Gautama were enlightened; I reserve judgement on that question due to lack of evidence, same as I do on the question of whether or not there is a God. I don't even know what it means to be enlightened. Do you? Do you think you know whether or not Osho and Gautama were enlightened, or if you believe Gautama was and Osho was not, do you admit this is a personal conviction and not knowledge? The philosopher in you should admit that, but I suspect the politician in you will not give a straight answer.
I see you quoted and mentioned me. Did you want me to add anything or was it just a reference?
I think you mischaracterize the move to prevent suffering above and beyond dealing with it. It's ok though, it's not just you. I think it is telling in Buddhism that you have to be born so you can escape the burden. Here we have a clear and decisive path (don't procreate), and the other is an arduous one that can be questioned and even if true is only had by the ones who have "reincarnated" to such a position to reach nirvana.
Here is maybe where we can both agree:
It is about right understanding.
I bet you there are people, right here on this forum, who have lived a relatively charmed life. That is so far, they haven't felt they had major negative setbacks, or ones that have "broken their spirit" and thus, LIFE MUST NOT BE SUFFERING. I don't agree with this. Certainly most Buddhists don't agree with this. This kind of Western notion of hedonic calculus for determining life's goodness is not quite the kind of "suffering" Buddha had in mind.
However, even in terms of this Westernized version of suffering (i.e. the hedonic calculus), at one moment, someone can beat the shit out of you and leave you for dead, you can get into a near-fatal car crash, you can encounter X, Y, Z, and then your former stance is fucked, and you were wrong by way of a new experience.
That is to say, suffering definitely does (in the case of Buddhist notions of the pervasiveness of suffering to existence) or certainly can be suffering (in the duller common, everyday sense of the word). In the Western's case, the potential for suffering itself is the kicker. Not necessarily the "thus lived experience". That is to say, this isn't a game where anything is guaranteed.
Not to mention, I do think there is a sense that someone can have very negative moments and after-the-fact assessments of life that can differ. Being in an awkward, deadly, annoying, and frustrating situation tends to look different than not being in one.
Anyways, this is all to say life has suffering, and this cannot be denied. Both the Pessimist and the Buddhist can agree with this.
What I would call for is a sort of Communal Catharsis. That is to say, like Buddhism, there needs to be appropriate understanding that suffering exists(!). If we don't even acknowledge this, we can't even get past square 1. So, if this is acknowledged, and that this world is not only not a utopia, but not even close to one, then we have some thinking to do about that...
Well, what is it then? All is vanity is a good ole place to start. But what does that mean? Empathy should come by way of tragic comedy. We need to understand all the nuanced ways we are all fucked, and if we understand this, then we can be on the same page about not wanting to continue it for others. We might also take things less seriously, and cope with negative situations a bit less harshly. It's not any grand metaphysical apotheosis, but it is simply a socially recognized realization. That is to say, the Pessimism is right in your face and not hidden by myths, or only whispered to therapists or your best friend. Everyone acknowledges it, understands it and kind of breath a collective sigh at dealing with the collective burdens and the individual burdens we all must deal with.
In general I am doubtful of whether your views on this subject are particularly rigorous, and this is because you are uncritically shifting between all sorts of different terms and concepts. Some include: intersubjective agreement, public demonstration, intersubjective testability, and empirical verification. These are all very different concepts, and the slipping back and forth from one to another will tend to preclude rigorous philosophical investigation.
Quoting Janus
I should think this is an uncontroversial claim, although "definitively confirmed" is another of those slippery concepts that you are shifting between. But in fact the claim in question is about a subjective state, and subjective states are empirical. Buddhism is, in fact, a highly empirical religion, and this is why it fits well in the West. The whole point of the original post was that, "It can be validated first person," and this is because it is based on a reproducible (and empirical) experience.
Quoting Janus
Okay, fair enough.
Quoting Janus
Well we can test testable claims and verify verifiable claims, and we are also capable of according a high degree of certitude to our own personal tests. But again, the Buddha's claim is verifiable. That's the whole point. So according to your own reasoning the Buddha's claim is something we can be certain of, and it "constitutes public knowledge."
But of course your assertion that "intersubjectively testable claims" constitute public knowledge is false, and furthermore I would be surprised if you yourself have any rigorous idea of what you mean by public knowledge.
I was responding to the point you made about Schopenhauer being 'overly optimistic'. What you see as his 'optimism', I see as the whole point of his philosophy (as I think he did too.) Also I think you've really got the wrong end of the shtick. The 'clear and decisive path' you speak of would not constitute a release from the cycle of re-birth. I think the Buddhist view would be that even if you don't procreate, you will be re-born in a future existence in accordance with your karma. I suppose in the absence of a belief in re-birth, it seems like escaping the cycle - but again, that is a nihilistic view. (Important distinction: there's a world of difference in religious philosophies between 'nothing' and 'no-thing-ness'. The former is mere absence, or the negation of the existence of some particular; the latter is the absence of specificity of the unmanifest/unborn/uncreated. It is not 'a thing' - neither this nor that ('neti, neti') but is also not mere absence or non-existence. This is at the basis of apophatic mysticism and 'the negative way' which occurs in all religious cultures. The inability to make this distinction is one of the root causes of nihilism. See The Cult of Nothingness, Roger Pol-Droit.)
But isn't that convenient...
Quoting Wayfarer
Saying something is "nihilistic" doesn't impute anything other than it's a term you use for X.
Also I wrote more in that post if you want to reply to that or not.
Or not - it might amount to a very 'inconvenient truth' indeed.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Nihilism is the description of various schools of philosophy which hold that nothing is real, or that nothing has any ultimate moral or ethical principle or implication. It is often associated (per Nietszche) with the 'death of God' signifiying the collapse of belief in religious ethical systems.
It's convenient in that it justifies procreation now doesn't it? Odd. Fuck it (literally), it's inevitable anyways.. If literally everyone stopped procreating, there is no guarantee any new evolution repeats to consciousness. That is not determined. In fact, perhaps it is an interesting feature, not a bug. Perhaps, when all animal entities get to a certain level of awareness, they stop procreating. Anyways, I am just trying to give understanding that there is a sort of hand-waving assertion that the inevitability of more humans (to thus be enlightened) must be the case.
And oddly enough, I think that not procreating also helps the Buddhist cause. As this actually promotes the wider soteriological end goal, not just the individual. Afterall, it would be better if there were no cycle not just that some can escape it.
And none of this seems to characterize my thoughts.
No it is not.
Antinatalism is an ethical principle so clearly violates your definition of nihilism as Quoting Wayfarer.
In that sense, many people have "nihilistic ideas", not just antinatalism.. That is to say, no belief in an afterlife. And even then, some antinatalists might even believe in such and have reasons related to that for their belief. Anyways, go back to that post as I went more in depth.
And also conflates 'nothing' and 'no-thing-ness' as I said in this post.
The possibility for public demonstration is the same as intersubjective testability and emprical verifiability. If I claim that it is raining, right here, right now the truth of that is publicly demonstrable, intersubjectively testable and empirically verifiable to those who are able to come and see. The same goes for any claim about observable phenomena.
Insinuating that my views are not rigorous is a suspect move. Attempt instead to address the arguments I make with rigorous counterarguments and then you will be attempting rigorous philosophical investigation.
Quoting Leontiskos
The "definitive" in "definitively confirmed" is only there for emphasis. Confirmation is confirmation. Subjective states are not empirical in the sense of being publicly observable. I can observe only your behavior, not your subjective state, whatever that term might be understood to mean. Only you are privy to that. Buddhism claims that the altered states of consciousness that are called "jñ?na", understood as 'direct knowing' may be achieved through practice, and I beleive this is true having experienced such states myself. Tell me, though, what do you think is known in such states?
Christian mystics think they know God, know that God exists. Some Buddhists claim to remember their past lives. None of this can be confirmed, the possibility of self-delusion is always present I believe. But even if it is accepted that it is possible to know such things, it is not possible to demonstrate that they are known. It is also not possible to demonstrate that someone is in such a state; they might be faking it. If you think I am wrong, then explain how such things could be known to be known.
Quoting Leontiskos
This is simply not true, and certainly not according to my own reasoning; how could anyone possibly know the truth of the Buddha's claim, unless they were in the same state as the Buddha. How could they know they were in the same state, and how could they possibly prove to the public that they were? Do you claim to be enlightened? Do you think Osho was enlightened? The foremost living German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk does; he spent a couple of years with Osho at Poona, although what he means by 'enlightenment' may be very different than what you mean. I am not using this as an appeal to authority by the way, because I acknowledge that Sloterdijk might be wrong, but it just shows that anyone could be wrong about any claim that someone, including themselves, is enlightened.
Quoting Leontiskos
Are you going to give some actual argument or counterexamples or are you just going to leave your statement that my assertion that intersubjectively testable claims (I should add "if true" of course) constitute (I should add "actual or potential" of course) public knowledge. Obviously, a claim must be actually tested and proven true to become actual public knowledge, and I took that as read.
And again, you try to use aspersion instead of argument; "I would be surprised if you yourself have any rigorous idea of what you mean by public knowledge". :roll:
No I get the way Buddhist concepts are about the idea that this is an "illusion" etc. It's doublespeak.
What if there were no living things in the world, and evolution never created any new form of consciousness?
You would have to say in your belief system that this is an impossibility. Is that correct? Let us say Earth is the only life with consciousness and the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, killed all life as well. What would you have to say based on your belief system?
Why don't you go ahead and try to actually define what you mean by these terms, and in the process show us that the various claims you are making are not tautological?
To take one of the claims, it seems fairly clear that not everything that can be tested by other subjects admits of the possibility for public demonstration (i.e. the possibility for public demonstration is not the same as intersubjective testability). This is because public demonstration is apparently premised on a shared (publicly available) object of inquiry, such as a single thermometer that everyone present can simultaneously read. But intersubjective testability in no way requires this shared object. The Buddha's claim can be tested by other subjects, but it cannot be a public object of simultaneous inquiry. Of course these arguments are based on my own understandings of the concepts, for you have provided no definitions for these terms you keep bandying about.
Quoting Janus
The point is that not everyone is equally worth talking to, and not everyone is equally capable of discussing certain subjects. Quixodian was right in implying such a truth, hard as it may be.
Quoting Janus
But "empirical" does not mean "publicly observable." You are mushing together terms again. A state of consciousness is an empirical reality, but it is not publicly observable.
Quoting Janus
Then you have successfully tested the empirical claim. Therefore you know it to be both testable and empirical.
Quoting Janus
These are vacuous objections, just like your earlier objection that the participants in my putative intersubjective agreement "Could be lying." They are vacuous because they equally apply to your own claims and theories, and to level them at me or Quixodian requires a double standard. My answer is therefore simple: tu quoque.
The other problem is that you are uncritically conflating different topics. We began talking about intersubjective agreement, and then we moved on to intersubjective confirmability, and now you have flown to another new topic of "demonstrating that someone is in such a [subjective] state." What does this have to do with intersubjective agreement or intersubjective confirmability? Gish gallop is not something that I entertain for overly long.
Quoting Janus
Right, they enter the same state, just like you did when you said, "I beleive this is true having experienced such states myself."
Quoting Janus
Again, these are two different topics that you keep conflating. To the first: the same way you did when you confirmed the existence of such states. If you did it, it must be possible. To the second: the same way the astrophysicist proves his theory to the hoi polloi (or doesn't). As I said earlier, if "the public" doesn't possess the requisite capacity to confirm a claim, then they will not be capable of confirming it. It is the same for scientific claims, and Arhats are as unconcerned to prove their claims to the hoi polloi as astrophysicists are.
Quoting Janus
You have just admitted that the claim was false by redacting it from (1) to (2):
(1) is substantially false, and it seems that you now recognize this. The reason (1) and (2) are drastically different is because public knowledge and potential public knowledge are two very different things. Intersubjective testability does not get you to public knowledge. It gets you to potential public knowledge, but that is a long ways from public knowledge! So this is another example of the way you are conflating these terms.
Quoting Janus
Well, go ahead and tell us what you mean by it.
(Out for a few days... Your next reply might be the last word on this.)
'What if you weren't here to ask me a question, and I weren't here to answer it?' :roll:
It's not even a hypothetical.
Dont play stupid. Im pretty sure you know what Im asking. It has to do with Thing in itself. If there are no animals what is the implication for Buddhism? What is the implication for how Buddhism views existing itself?
Well, ask a stupid question....
Anyway, what was it that prompted that question? You said:
Quoting schopenhauer1
What does that refer to? If you explain that, I might understand what you were asking.
I was intending to point out that such forms of understanding are not just to be dismissed as 'mystical or spiritual', a categorisation which I claim is a cultural bias. It's due to the way we as a culture 'divide up' or understand experience.
Janus' response was:
Quoting Janus
Then I said, this is basically empiricism (or scientific empiricism):
Quoting Janus
So, Janus denies appealing to empiricist principles while at the same time insisting on empiricist principles. That's where the confusion lies.
Yes, you're right and it seems you are one of those.
I've outlined the ways that knowledge claims may be tested, by observation, mathematical operations and logic. Can you think of any others? How shall we test the claim that the Buddha was enlightened; just outline the methodology. I believe you know you can't and you just don't want to admit it.
I'm rapidly losing interest in trying to engage with those who are intellectually dishonest and can't see past their own agendas.
More ad hominems, then.
Quoting Janus
Ill put that aside, to venture an answer: learning by doing. But I dont think the question was the Buddha enlightened? is really at issue in the debate. The question is epistemological, what are valid means of knowledge, and my claim was simply that the Buddhist tradition, as an example, does provide a means of testing, finding out, exploring the validity of its methods and claims, which shouldnt be dismissed simply as mystical and spiritual. Why not? Well, I know that Stephen Bachelor, a well-known proponent of secular Buddhism, denies that the Buddha was a mystic at all, and I also know that the term spiritual is alien to the Buddhist tradition. Im attempting to establish the theoretically factual basis for there being a blissful escape, which is the point at issue.
As you should know from past exchanges, I am well familiar with Stephen Bachelor's secular Buddhism, having read several of his books, and as I have said at least a few times to you, I agree with his approach. So, I have no issue with the idea that through certain practices altered states can be realized; I said as much a few posts ago, when I highlighted the distinction between knowing that and knowing how.
Of course, if you learn to alter your consciousness through meditation then you have acquired know-how, but my point has been all along that on account of an altered state of consciousness you cannot claim to know any metaphysical truth.
As I see it "a blissful escape" can be attained via several means: activities that might lead to flow states, to present centered awareness, the eternity of the now. You should know well enough by now I have no argument with any of that. I have never said that states of consciousness are matters of faith, but that any metaphysical conclusions you might draw from them are.
After all this time I still have no idea what exactly it is about my position that you actually disagree with.
It is, perhaps, an infelicitous term. I dont think the goal of either Buddhism or Schopenhauer is being blissed out or attaining a meditative high. What is at issue is not just subjective, even if it is something that can only be known first-person. But you willl say, sure, you can have great feelings, you can alter your consciousness - but it cant amount to knowledge, as it doesnt meet empirical standards. Is that right?
I don't think of it in terms of having "blissful feelings" but in terms of being at peace, in a state of acceptance, not anxious about imagined possibilities, being present, not thinking about the past or the future, or about death, being free to create or just to be, however the spirit moves: so, simply in a state where things flow smoothly.
Of course, this can only be known "first person" but it is really, for me at least, when the sense of the "person' is not there at all. The sense of the person is always 'me in relation to others'; this is what I want to be free from. Not free from caring about others, but free from what I might imagine others think of me. I think the unfreedom of such egoic concerns is what Sartre meant when he wrote: "Hell is other people".
This can be cultivated, but it is not a matter of knowing that anything is the case; rather it is knowing how to be, of accepting that I do not really know what the case is. So it does "amount to knowledge" in that sense, and empirical standards have nothing to do with it. I just don't believe that metaphysical claims that the nature of reality can be known in these states are valid. I might feel like I know the nature of reality, but I think that is just an idea that accompanies a profound sense of insight, the details or implications of which I really don't know or understand.
Put another way, experience, even ordinary everyday experience is really ineffable, all our words and thoughts are a kind of overlay' so not to be taken too seriously. We are not going to be able to think ourselves there. There is nothing more important than how we live this life. That's my take anyway.
:pray: I respect your honesty in grappling with these questions. What it seems to me that you're saying that you have intuitive insights that the ego/self can't deal with.
Last night I watched a presentation on Lacan which featured this slide:
I think in these kinds of debates, we're coming up against that 'invisible order' and that this influences what you're saying about what does and what doesn't constitute valid philosophical insight. The examples you gave of what you call 'direct observation' all refer to sense-able phenomena, things that can be objectively seen and measured, and then maths and logic. You're appealing to those as rules - that's the 'network of rules and meanings'. But there's also an insight, which is neither strictly empirical nor mathematical, which you first acknowledge but then appear to deny. As I said, I get it. Hard questions. Schopenhauer himself spent considerably time and energy grappling with them.
Quoting Janus
I think a leap of faith is required. There is no external guarantee - I can't show it.* There are many risks, and there is plenty of potential for self-delusion. Comes with the territory. Krishnamurti's 'pathless land' is often quoted but few mention the final sentence of the leading paragraph - 'If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.'
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* There's another unspoken factor here. The term for the Hindu philosophical systems is 'darshana', meaning 'a seeing'. An audience with a sage/teacher/guru is a darshan. A meeting with a great teacher may convey an understanding impossible to put into words. That would be a 'showing' or 'seeing' which might convey the gist. A canonical example from Buddhism would be the Flower Sermon. Of course, all of this is in the domain of revealed religion, so properly speaking taboo on this forum.
I think this is right. I don't see the "invisible order" as being the "symbolic dimension", though, as Zizek , following Lacan, seems to be saying. I don't think reality, what we see as reality, is socially constructed, but rather socially mediated. As I've said more than a few times, I think animals "see as" just as we do. and I don't think primal language, and its later transformation into written, pictographic and symbolic language as well as visual representation, would have been possible without the seminal "seeing as". Of course, all of this is just my opinion, what seems most plausible to me, my personal faith: I can't prove any of it is so.
I also agree with you about what you seem to be implying: the wordless insight. So, I do acknowledge it and only deny its literal word aptitude. Evocation, invocation, metaphor, parable in art, poetry, literature and scripture I don't deny but revere most of all.
Quoting Wayfarer
Exactly, the leap of faith...nothing creative can be done without that most important element. "Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil".
Quoting Wayfarer
As I think you know, I have always been drawn to Zen and I think showing what cannot be said is its essence, with the Flower Sermon being understood as its seminal moment. In terms of poetry, the great Haikus of Basho, Buson and Issa (as translated and commented on by R H Blyth) have been a lasting influence.
I don't think you and I are as far apart as it may sometimes seem. :smile:
You need a consciousness. No animals, no consciousness. Whence consciousness? This is that paradox of the first mind and ancestral statements, etc. The idealist always needs this in the equation.
There is no need for escape if there's no consciousness to escape with/from. But the doublespeak is saying that there never was a time without mind. This is the doublespeak I guess:
Quoting Wayfarer
It speaks of being "uncreated/unborn", but the way through this understanding is through physically "being born". You can say that I take a naive view of "born" then, but there is the doublespeak.
You hold onto nirvana itself as a desire, you desire enough that you will let the suffering continue so you can have nirvana. But the wrong-headed thinking you accuse me of, I can say back at what you are saying. That is to say, you need to have the "problem" to "fix the problem". And of course, for your philosophy to work, there can be no other way to solve "the problem" than your solution. And your solution needs people to be born so they can solve the problem with your solution.
But here there is an escape. Don't start the problem. The end. There is no, "But wait!.. You aren't getting rid of the unborn cycles of karmic blah blah and such and such". That is post-facto defense to keep the desire for the solution relevant and necessary.
It reminds me of this simple answer to a supposedly hard haiku-type question:
We get along fine when you don't pull your A J Ayer shtick :razz:
Quoting schopenhauer1
The reality of existence is not a word game or polemical gambit.
But I am refuting the metaphysical premise that there will always be representation. Representation without animal minds is not possible. So your move is to say mind is somewhere not in animals. This is always the paradox Schopenhauer and idealists and perhaps Buddhists must contend with. Otherwise, the nihilistic solution of passively not procreating would technically end suffering within a generation for the animal who has self awareness about this. That is to say, the unborn truly is being never born. That ends the cycle.
But this is too physiological an answer. You need it to be something that cant be solved in such a straightforward way. So bring on ideas of karmic eternal recurrence and all that.
I think the problem is more that you misunderstand what I say and accuse me of being either an empiricist or a positivist. An empiricist believes that all knowledge comes from the senses; I don't believe that. A positivist thinks all metaphysical statements are worthless or meaningless; I don't believe that either.
Did you stop responding? Just to go over where I left off:
Quoting schopenhauer1
To provide some alternative, there is the notion of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) that Tononi worked on. So according to him, he says that it is possible to measure a system's "consciousness" by a function called "phi" that he derived. These systems may be non-animal. Even a thermostat, according to this theory may have some degree of "phi" I guess.
I am not sure how that answers the question any better than other materialist answers that have a hidden dualism or fall into the homunculus fallacy.
That is to say, just because I criticize idealism, doesn't mean I don't criticize materialist approaches.
Only based on your statements which frequently suggest those associations. Seems more likely to me that you are not aware of those own tendencies in your own statements.
Those associations are yours, not mine; I am well familiar with both empiricism and positivism and although I think there is some truth in both of those positions I don't think they are the whole story.
For example, both Wittgenstein and Popper were associated with and admired by the logical positivists, but both distanced themselves from the Vienna Circle. As I remember Wittgenstein of the Tractatus period rejected the idea that everything that is worth knowing can be explained by science and although he agreed that metaphysical propositions are literally nonsense, in the sense of being non-sense, he saw the arts and literature as being infused with the spirit that animates the questions of metaphysics.
Popper disagreed with the idea that metaphysical speculation is of no use to scientific practice, and he believed, rightly, I think and as history itself attests, that metaphysical ideas may stimulate interest which opens up new avenues of scientific investigation. Think Newton and Kepler for examples.
Also, I don't believe all knowledge comes from the senses, I think we also know things simply on account of being embodied within a world, and also language itself vastly opens up the scope of what can be known. Another point is that we can know in new ways, via thinking through novel concepts, and these new ways of knowing may not be falsifiable or consist in knowing that anything is the case, but they are forms of know-how akin to knowing how to play music, paint or write poetry.
1. My take is that Zapfe and Benatar (not sure I've spelled them correctly) are materialist philosophers - and if you're nothing other than a physical body, then when the body dies it's all over, that is the end of it. If nonbeing or nonexistence is the final end, then that is all there is to it. There is no 'problem of existence' to solve if you don't exist!
I don't know where Schopenhauer stood on the question of life after death, but I'm sure he would not envisage any such state as 'eternal life' or an immortal soul. But he also hints that the attempt to escape from the sufferings of life through suicide cannot be successful. The relevant passage is
[quote=WWR§54]someone who is oppressed by the burdens of life, who certainly desires life and affirms it, but detests its sufferings and in particular does not want to put up with the difficult lot that has fallen to him any longer: a person like this cannot hope for liberation in death, and cannot save himself through suicide; the temptation of cool, dark Orcus (i.e. 'underworld' in Roman mythology) as a haven of peace is just a false illusion. The earth turns from day into night; the individual dies: but the sun itself burns its eternal noontime without pause. For the will to life, life is a certainty: the form of life is the endless present; it does not matter how individuals, appearances of the Idea, come into existence in time and pass away like fleeting dreams.[/quote]
As the will is what is eternal, I guess this means that it will always find a way to be born, and, insofar as we identify with it, we will be carried along with the tide. Unless you're truly de-coupled from that urge - which S. says is the aim of asceticism - then you haven't succeeded in any real liberation.
2. As far as Buddhism is concerned, the two 'erroneous views' of life are nihilism, on the one side, and eternalism, on the other. Nihilism is not hard to explain - it's the view of materialists, for whom there are no consequences ('fruits') of actions after this life, the 'body returns to the elements'. There are many variations of nihilism given in the texts (Buddhists love lists and compendiums) which include the 'belief that life is due to fortuitous causes', for instance. (From the Buddhist point of view, many modern people are nihilist.) 'Eternalism' is a rather more difficult idea to convey, but my interpretation (and I did do a postgrad thesis on it) is that it is the idea that through meritorious actions, one can be reborn in fortuitous circumstances forever - that is, always continue to enjoy fortunate rebirths. (In the social context in which the Buddha lived and taught, there was an existing acceptance of re-birth, and also, it is said, ascetics who were able to recall previous lives.) 'Eternalism' is also associated with the idea of there being an unchanging essence (often described as 'soul', although I question that), whereas everything knowable is always subject to change (the well-known impermanence, anicca, of Buddhism.) So eternalism is the idea that there is an always-existing entity that can go on forever.
But nibbana (Nirv??a) is neither ceasing to exist, nor continuing to exist. Both of those, at root, are desires - the desire not to be (because of the burdensome nature of life) or the desire to continue to be (because of the pleasurable nature of life). So those drives are, at root, hatred or aversion, and desire or attachment (two of the 'three poisons', the third being stupidity or delusion. However, it should be mentioned that the canonical text which describes all this is the longest text in the Pali canon and these are obviously deep and recondite matters of Buddhist doctrine.)
3. As for the nature of mind - this is obviously a very deep philosophical question. But overall, this is where I find myself most in agreement with Schopenhauer - that objects exists for subjects. I've thrashed it out in any number of thread here over many years, so I'll just try and present a very short version. You will object, 'but surely this entails that the Universe didn't exist before living subjects. How can you justify that, when we know that living organisms, especially sentient organisms, are very recent arrivals?'
My answer to that is that: no, the world does not exist outside our perception of it - but neither does it not exist. 'Existence' is a compounded or complex term, describing that which comprises objects of perception and also our cognitive systems which assimilate information from the environment and generate our sense of the world, and which provides the cognitive framework within which the very idea of existence is meaningful. (Hence, 'world as Idea'.) That sense of the world is the world. It's no use asking, 'what happens to it, if we don't exist', because we cannot but conceive of it, or of anything, in the absence of that, nor can we really get outside of that to see it as it would be with no observer whatever. None of which negates the empirical fact that your or my consciousness only came into existence in very recent times. (I know this is a right can'o'worms, but there it is.)
Yes, that is Schop's interpretation more-or-less. Every subject is a manifestation of Will. Even if your subjectivity is gone, subjectivity en toto is still there, striving for its objects in space and time.
But this is where I asked at the beginning what Schop's take is on solipsism. That is to say, if one achieves "nirvana" and quiets the Will for good in oneself, is that quieting the whole Will? That seems to be at odds. That is to say, the reason suicide is no good is because Will Proper still remains even if your will ceases. However, he seems to be saying that with Nirvana, one Will Proper will cease. How is that so? It contradicts his prior point that suicide is not a valid way of ceasing Will Proper because it is only an individual will. So which is it for Schopenhauer?
Quoting Wayfarer
But you need a life to exist in order for you to have desire or suffering or dissatisfaction. The problem exists prior to finding a solution out of it. And this is where we disagree most as far as what to do. That is, I think it cannot be denied that we exist first before we desire some sort of sublime state of "unborn" or whatever paradoxical state you want to ascribe to Nirvana. And because you cannot accept ancestrality as legitimate (that there was a time before animals and consciousness), you will say that mind was always in the equation and it is our job to calm it.
But here I can form a more materialistic version of Schopenhauer. That is to say, clearly this seeking Nirvana is always going to be the case. However, there was a time when it wasn't necessary, and presumably there will be a time when it is unnecessary. That is to say, there was a time before humans/animals and a time when humans/animals will go extinct. That negates this "ever present mind" idea that is necessary so that materialist solutions will always be invalid. However, it seems to me that there is a solution. It starts with the already-born recognizing the suffering and simply not starting new individual experiences of that suffering.
Also, the Sangha in Buddhism isn't just utilitarian to get to Nirvana. I see it as like group therapy, or even going to a comedy show, as a cathartic communal endeavor. That is why I advocate for "communal catharsis". That is to say, we understand the plight and recognize it in each other and our situations to help relieve some of the pain and stress. In this conception, it is the idea akin to Hartmann that one can understand about the human condition.
That is to say things like "science, pleasure, tradition, and achievements" are somehow the hopeful carrot-stick that make it all worthwhile. You cannot impute all materialists (so-called "nihilists") with the same brush. In fact, most "nihilists" (as you call them) are more-or-less optimists. Look at Dawkins and all the rest of the popular atheists. They are optimistic about scientific innovation being the height of human achievement and thus a sort of "reason" to exist.. presumably, to have more children, even though we suffer, because "it's worth it" to see these advancements play out and do more research. In other words, Pessimists (like Benatar, Zapffe, Cioran, etc.) are very much out of favor and in the minority, even in the "nihilistic" camp.
Quoting Wayfarer
Indeed, and this is a whole philosophy of mind debate in itself.
There may be a view from nowhere without consciousness, because there seems to be an aspect where subject/object is always in the picture. What is a planet "in-itself"? What is a universe "in-itself"? What is a sub-atomic particle "in-itself"? What is a process "in-itself" even?
However, the exact answers for that don't necessarily mean that thus, everything is an eternal X (Will, subjective being, etc.). Rather, it just means, idealism might not be an answer. Also, it seems that it's a necessary component so that Buddhism doesn't collapse into Pessimism. Something like Will needs to be there and thus a solution will always be by way of this special technique that Buddha or the myth of Buddha has shared through the writings and lineage of sages. However, this goes back to what I am saying earlier. Suffering only exists when there are beings that suffer. If being is not ever-present but of a particular time and place, then this idea of an eternal struggle is moot. But also, if it is an eternal struggle, then the escape from it seems to not do much for anything as it doesn't solve the cycle of suffering, just one instance of it. Clearly, Buddha's enlightenment (or whatever word you want to use), did not negate the cycle of suffering itself.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well, yes, but as many have pointed out, Dawkins and Dennett have kind of appropriated many of the tropes of Christian humanism, but then wrapped them around the idea scientific progress. But there's a clear conflict in their philosophy, in that both of them see humans as basically gene machines or robots, but then don't seem to have the philosophical persipecuity to understand the inherent conflict in their worldviews.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't think the idea of a 'technique' or a 'method' does justice to it. It's far more radical than that. I take the major implication to be that we ourselves, insofar as we're 'normal human beings', have a defective understanding of the nature of reality. That is the meaning of avidya.
There's a school of Buddhist philosophy called Yog?c?ra which is often said to be idealist, although scholars point out that there are very important differences between Indian and Western idealism. It's sometimes been translated as 'cognition-only'. You can see the ChatGPT summary here. I'm interested in the common boundaries between these schools and the German idealists.
That sounds exactly like what happens when the body dies and its constituent particles continue to exist while the form is consumed and (mostly) disappears into the matrix.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Animals will not do that, they will continue breeding as usual, which means there will always be suffering as long as there are animals to suffer.
I think both of you guys have a rather surprisingly dim view of the value of this life considered just in itself. I can see that life has its dark moments and aspects, but I certainly don't count it as an overall net negative, and I would venture to guess that many, perhaps most, people do not have such a view either. Perhaps it comes down to brain chemistry; some are just cursed with a dearth of serotonin or whatever.
Ok thanks, but what of the questions. Do you have any hypothesis or inking of an answer from a Schopenhauerian perspective? Here they are again:
Quoting schopenhauer1
And I also brought up this:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Do you have anything to speak to that?
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not sure it's a conflict so much, if I am reading this right. Rather, it's simply a downplaying of forms of suffering. It's the usual tropes of the rest of humanity. As Zapffe laid out, it's a mechanism of defense- anchoring (Science and Progress and Humanism), isolation (what suffering?), and distraction (pleasures of any kind). These help mitigate any ethical/political stance against the other side of the coin regarding the human condition.
All this emphasis on individuals finding enlightenment, and nothing about the karmic cycle itself. Communal catharsis. Right understanding.
I don't pretend to speak on behalf of other animal species. If they eventually evolve into self-aware beings who can deliberate, they too can decide to prevent suffering. I see them, however, as suffering less because of not having the level of self-awareness as humans. We have overshot Eden and fell into time.
I don't see forms of suffering as some sort of aggregated thing. I see it as morality at the margins. You don't not save a life because you can't save everyone's life.
Quoting Janus
Well, I think it's a political and ethical question. When someone decides to birth another person, they are deciding for that person, in an aggressively paternalistic fashion, that this life's spectrum of experiences and limited choices (culturally and physically), as well as the suffering that is inevitable and incumbent with life is ok to impose on another person. If carried out, it becomes a gross violation of principles of autonomy and non-malfeasance. Starting someone else's suffering, with the justification of "but there could be good experiences" or "I have a hunch because ad populum" doesn't justify going ahead and violating these kinds of principles.
Also, coupled with these principles, the logic makes sense that "not starting good experiences" (i.e. not depriving already existing person, but rather starting it de novo), is neutral whilst "starting bad experiences" (i.e. starting suffering de novo, not mitigating a person who is already suffering) is morally bad. It is suffering that is the basis of the ethics and is the morally relevant aspect, not any other contingencies. Certainly using people because "Science" or "Discovery" or "Pleasure" or "Self-Actualization" (none of which matters for the non-existent) or so you can bullshit on a philosophy forum, or so you can tinker in your garden on your retirement plan, or anything else is not a justification.
Couple the violation of autonomy, non-malfeasance, and asymmetry of starting suffering versus starting good experiences, and the case is pretty strong.
The political aspect is the fact that we are "pressing" people into the dictates/limits that this universe entails. People vote with their procreation "yay". That the human condition is something that must be experienced by others. It's imposing not only a life, but the form of life that comes with having to survive as a human who suffers and deals with burdens in the world. As I said earlier to your inevitable comments which I predicted (because by now it's very predictable what people will say):
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/831573
I would really have to read a whole bunch more of Schopenhauer to take a stab at that. So far, I'm pretty well on board with 'World as Idea', but I still have both gaps and doubts about 'world as will'. Hopefully some of the next chapters of Urs Apps' book might touch on that.
I think, from the perspective of Indian philosophies generally, that the 'price of ignorance' is that we have some really fundamental and basic misconception about the nature of existence. Like, we have tinted glasses on, which influence everything we see, but which we're accustomed to, so that we don't notice we're wearing them. I suppose all philosophy is like that, in a way, but I don't think there are many Western equivalents, outside Schopenhauer and the German idealists, that share that kind of understanding with Indian philosophy.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well, I might venture is that this is still implicitly naturalistic, in that it takes the empirical/sensable/phenomenal domain as primary and mind as secondary or a product of that. Indeed it doesn't seem there could be any alternative, given that the most primitive life forms are understood as the most primitive instances of mind, and that the mind evolved along with the increasing complexity of organisms over the hundreds of millions of years since. (although).
But from the perspectives of the cosmic philosophies, mind is more like the organising intelligence which gives rise to organisms in the first place (which doesn't necessarily mean theistic creation as this kind of general understanding is characteristic of e.g. neoplatonism.) So from a cosmic perspective, our embodiment in material form might be what is ultimately transient. I attended lectures by an esteemed prof of Hindu philosophy, who used to intone, in that lilting Indian school-teacherly way, that evolution was the process by which 'what is latent becomes patent' - that the whole Universe is a way for Brahman to explore horizons of being. Within that explanatory framework, mok?a is the point where the devotee realises his/her true nature or 'supreme identity' in Watts' terms.
Without biasing the metaphysics, what would a non-idealist Schopenhauer look like in your estimation?
Quoting Wayfarer
At the end of the day, philosophy-of-mind is either a mind-is-already-present or an emergent phenomenon. Those are the two broad categories. Most idealists take the first. Most materialists take the second. Both have their glaring problems. Materialists must ignore qualities and then insert it in after the fact. They also must contend with the problem of a view from nowhere. The idealists have to deal with the incredulity that mind is universal in some sense, being that it seems to be empirically the case at least, that mind accompanies some sort of cellular/nervous system.
Certainly the "hard problemers" have put the focus on the "hard" part so that either can't skirt to their preferred tenets and not address the elephant in the room. One simply can't just ignore qualia for example, or wave it away as illusion without accounting for the illusion. Idealists also can't deny things like ancestrality and extinction, and a universe without animal consciousness (or perhaps just "consciousness" or at least a "point of view").
Clearly humans can detect regularities in nature. One can say this was devised by the ancient Greeks, but certainly catapulted to greater heights with Galileo and the Renaissance thinkers. John Locke proposed that there are primary or secondary qualities. Unofficially, this is the stance when observing natural physical properties like mass, spin, charge, and such. The valence electrons and their quantifiable properties allow for chemical properties, whose molecular properties create the topology that allows for biological processes, etc. These primary properties are "out there" and we are just "observing them". The secondary qualities are simply "our qualitative perception" of them.
What does it mean when there is a view from nowhere (i.e. when there is no conscious animal / a point of view)? A realist my propose that it is the charges and spin and mass, and elementary interactions of particles/waves or something of this nature. These have existed since there was a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Idealists need not postulate a world of mind. It is the interactions of particle forces that "really" exist.
But this starts a series of questions...
1) How do interactions between particles "happen"?
Realist Answer: Time and space are not mind dependent. Thus events are localized.
1a) But even if that is so, "what" is interacting?
Realist Answer: The various properties of particles are interacting.
1b) But even so, "what" does it mean to interact without a point of view?
Realist Answer: There need not be a mind for localized interaction in time/space. Wherever interaction occurs that is an event in time/space.
1c) But even so, how can we intelligebly say an event happened without a knower?
Realist Answer: You don't need a knower. Since time/space is real, these conditions allow for the event.
And on and on it goes. I guess then it becomes a question of what it means if "time/space" is real, and how that allows for existence for an event.
I think it's best to start with a series of thought exercises on these kind of things. For example:
1) What is the liminal view of an organic molecule that is the first functioning cell?
2) Look at our own wills/bodies/minds in the present. Notice there is already an MO for the human animal from the start. That is, to want/need/fill the lack. And here is Schopenhauer/Buddhism's great insights. Something about our wills reveals something about consciousness.
3) When something emerges, does there need to be a point of view prior to the emergent property? If not, how is it that emergence works from nothing to something?
And yet you speak on behalf of other species:
Quoting schopenhauer1
You may be right, or you may not be right; we simply don't and cannot, measure the suffering of other species, or even of other humans.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So it may seem to you, but you make the mistake of thinking there are matters of fact when it comes to whether something is moral or not. If there is any objectivity in morals it could only be the intersubjective opinion about any act you care to name that consists in the most common view. On this question your opinion is so far from the common view that it would arguably seem ridiculous to most people.
In any case, I've thought about it, I've heard all your arguments, I personally never decided to have children, which means I have no skin in the game, and yet I still disagree with you, so there is no point insistently rehearsing all the same arguments I've heard before.
Materialists don't have to contend with the problem of "a view from nowhere". To say that the world existed prior to humanity is to express a view, a human view, but it does not follow that it entails that there must be a view from nowhere. In other words, if the world exists absent perceivers, then there is no view, but it does not follow that there is no world, just that there is no perceived world.
Also in the idealist model, if there is a universal mind or God that holds the world in view, that view would be the view from everywhere, or in other words from nowhere in particular, not from nowhere at all, just as such a God, if it existed, would not exist nowhere, but everywhere, and only nowhere in the sense of 'nowhere in particular'. If you said such a god existed nowhere at all, that would be no different than saying that it simply didn't exist.
To address that, I'll refer to this:
Quoting schopenhauer1
The division of 'primary and secondary', Descartes' divison of mind and matter, and science comprising the quantitative analysis of objective qualities, sets the framework for the modern weltanschauung. I'll refer to a paragraph I frequently cite from Thomas Nagel's 2012 book Mind and Cosmos:
You can see how the 'problem of consciousness' arises directly out of this formulation. It's because the objective methodology of modern science deliberately excludes or attempts to 'bracket out' the subject (although this criticism can't be applied to phenomenology, which sought to remedy this.) All the 'hard problem of consciousness' argument does is point that out. And why is the mind not included? Because - and this is a deceptively simple point - mind is not an object. Here is where I find concordance with Schopenhauer:
[quote=Schopenhauer, WWI]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. ...We never know it, but it is always the knower wherever there is knowledge.[/quote]
Which also finds an exact parallel in the Upani?ads. This is from a dialogue between the sage and a questioner, with the latter asking for an explicit definition of ?tman.
[quote=Source;https://www.swami-krishnananda.org/brdup/brhad_III-01.html#part4:~:text=This%20passage%20has%20two%20meanings]"Tell me directly 'this is the ?tman' just as you say 'this is a cow, this is a horse'. Do not give an indirect definition of it as you have just done." ...Please give that description and do not simply say, 'this is that'...Y?jñavalkya says: "You tell me that I have to point out the Self as if it is a cow or a horse. Not possible! It is not an object like a horse or a cow. I cannot say, 'here is the ?tman; here is the Self'. It is not possible because you cannot see the seer of seeing. The seer can see that which is other than the Seer, or the act of seeing. An object outside the seer can be beheld by the seer. How can the seer see himself? How is it possible? You cannot see the seer of seeing. You cannot hear the hearer of hearing. You cannot think the Thinker of thinking.You cannot understand the Understander of understanding. That is the ?tman. Nobody can know the ?tman inasmuch as the ?tman is the Knower of all things. So, no question regarding the ?tman can be put, such as "What is the ?tman?' 'Show it to me', etc. You cannot show the ?tman because the Shower is the ?tman; the Experiencer is the ?tman; the Seer is the ?tman; the Functioner in every respect through the senses or the mind or the intellect is the ?tman. As the basic Residue of Reality in every individual is the ?tman, how can we go behind It and say, 'This is the ?tman?' Therefore, the question is impertinent and inadmissible. The reason is clear. It is the Self. It is not an object.[/quote]
(In the end the questioner finally 'gets it' - and falls silent.)
And there isn't really a naturalistic response to this - not in terms of standard naturalism, anyway, as naturalism assumes the subject-object division and an objective account. It's analogical to trying to develop a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional space.
Um, that's what I mean it's the view from nowhere, not the view of nowhere.
Quoting Janus
But that part was not about idealist views, and I explicitly said that.
Hence I said "I see them...". It's precisely because I don't know what they "think or feel" as I said.
Quoting Janus
Well enough I guess. But to the claim you made about morality, I think it's more about first principles and whether one's actions accord with them. That is to say, it is akin to calling out a politician who is corrupt in the same way and degree in your party as much as in the opponent's party. That is to say, a large part of the how morality functions is simply being consistent with one's own values. More-or-less, people's values do (and we can debate the meta-ethical reasons for it but that's not the argument) care about suffering and autonomy and not causing harm. It is simply applying it to realms where people turn a blind eye to because of preference, tradition, and the like. That's not consistency in following values.
None of the context-dependent reasons to cause harm can be used in this scenario either, as you would need a person for that to matter for, so there we go.
I'm saying that on the materialist perspective there is no view in a world lacking any percipients, whether from nowhere or of nowhere.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I know, I just added that for a bit of extra spice.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes, but most people would not see life as a net harm although of course it is going to involve some harm. Like discipling your kids or sending them to school, the overall benefit would generally be seen as outweighing the harm, otherwise people would not have kids deliberately and thoughtfully, which no doubt many do.
Anyway, we've been over these arguments enough times and I know you are not going to agree, so I don't want to get drawn back into these arguments again.
Actually, the SEP entry addresses this very question in Section 6.
It goes on:
Quite so! That's where the idea of will as a kind of universal force comes unstuck in my view. It can't really account for what is other than it, as it has no intentional intelligence. But equating 'will' with 'the divine' is exactly the kind of idea he vehemently criticizes in Fichte and Schelling, saying that they are preaching religion in the guise of philosophy.
Then again, maybe his hostility to religion colors his judgement. After all,
There's a saying in the NT, basic to the Christian faith 'let not my will be done but thine' which is as much a denial of will as anything Schopenhauer says. But because he denies God, that avenua does not seem to be open to him. It's puzzling. I think, maybe, it's 'churchianity' which he's so hostile to, more so that 'religion' per se.
In the very last paragraph of WWI, we read:
[quote=Schopenhauer] if we turn our glance from our own needy and embarrassed condition to those who have overcome the world, in whom the will, having attained to perfect self-knowledge, found itself again in all, and then freely denied itself, and who then merely wait to see the last trace of it vanish with the body which it animates; then, instead of the restless striving and effort, instead of the constant transition from wish to fruition, and from joy to sorrow, instead of the never-satisfied and never-dying hope which constitutes the life of the man who wills, we shall see that peace which is above all reason, that perfect calm of the spirit, that deep rest, that inviolable confidence and serenity, the mere reflection of which in the countenance, as Raphael and Correggio have represented it, is an entire and certain gospel; only knowledge remains, the will has vanished.[/quote]
He then compares this to the Prajñ?p?ramit? of the Buddha. We may well ask - If only knowledge remains, then what is it knowledge of? Maybe the answer is that we won't know until we reach it - and precious few are destined to do that. Until then, we'll never know.
You seem confused. That is the view from nowhere. Meaning there is a somewhere (materially ontologically speaking) but with no view of it.
Quoting Janus
This doesnt refute my claim about blind eye and I specifically mentioned this below because you would answer using these kind of non analogous examples of mitigation of already existing people:
Quoting schopenhauer1
That's a really interesting section. This almost directly addresses the OP here:
It definitely mirrors gnostic/neoplatonic (and similar) notions of the ineffable nature of the thing-itself. That is to say, Will is only Will in hindsight of Representation. However, Will without representation is ineffably more complex than simply the "striving" that it manifests in its representational form (i.e. as a referent from the point of view of a subject for an object conditioned by space, time, and causality).
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, he definitely doesn't want it to be of a religious nature. From this, I can only think to mean that it should not be attached to either a 1) telos / logos or 2) dogmatic religious system of beliefs (like Christianity). Clearly he does believe in sublime states of being, so "mystical" in some sense can be applied here.
Quoting Wayfarer
See my comment above.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, essentially it's ineffable. I still think none of this answers my main question:
Quoting schopenhauer1
In other words, is denying will, denying one's individual only or all of Will itself? If it is denying individual will only, then why is suicide not valid? If all of Will is denied/nullified, how so? What does that even mean? Pretending someone like a Buddha achieved Nirvana, the "illusion" of a representational version of Will is still here it seems in all its manifestations.
I'm glad we're on the same page.
Everyone can claim they are engaging in good faith, especially those who aren't. What we have, I believe, is not good faith argumentation but rather post hoc rationalization in support of some variety of scientism. Hence the equivocations, the goal post shifting, the vague allusions to empiricism, and finally the descent into superficial eristic with the kamikaze wielding of arguments that undermine your own position as well (e.g. The participants in your intersubjective agreement could be lying!). I would simply want to call such an approach unserious. Good luck.
Good finds. They are glaring.
It's even weirder when you can literally predict the next move, call it out before they do it, and then they do it anyways as if you didn't call it out. Generally, one tries to avoid what is being called out. Some people lean into it.
Right! "Queer as folk," as the old saying goes.
But I only interjected to take exception to an unfair characterization of Wayfarer's claim. It went about as well as could be hoped for. :smile:
Why call it a view if there is no view? It's no view from anywhere; so obviously we cannot imagine what it is, because that would be to turn it into a view from somewhere.
There's a typo in the second passage you quoted; I left out a 'not'. I don't know if that would make any difference to your response which I couldn't make sense of.
Look, I get it that if one is entrenched in a desire for transcendent, permanent salvation then life will seem to be nothing but suffering, this is exemplified in the life of Guatama, who began life as a prince who had his every need catered to. He never experienced poverty, sickness and death until, say, early adulthood, and when he saw that and realized that it was only luck that had preserved him from these rigours, he set out on a mission to conquer the suffering they represent permanently. He abandoned his wife and child, his family and the throne, so powerful was his obsession with this mission. I have no doubt you are well familiar with the story.
It seems to me the difference between you and @Wayfarer is that he believes in the possibility of salvation, whereas you don't believe it is possible. For me, I am neither convinced it is possible nor impossible, but having been involved in the past with Gurdjieff foundations, Tibetan Buddhist practice and even a brief stint with a Bubba Free John organization, I became convinced that for everyone I met there the search was a kind of fantasy pursuit, ultimately a cult of the personality, because I never met anyone who I believed had anything like the kind of strength of commitment that is exemplified in the story of Gautama.
What I do know from experience is that it is possible to identify the kinds of habits of thought that make your life more miserable than it needs to be, and to learn to let go of those habits, and that it is possible to alter consciousness, to live in the present, to let go of concerns about the past and the future.
We are all different, so of course we are all going to see life somewhat or even very differently. That is one of the difficulties encountered on these forums; it seems the common assumption is that everyone should understand life the same way, so folk defend their own particular views and obsessions and become defensive, perhaps go into denial or double-down when they are challenged.
So, as i see it both you and Wayfarer view life through a lens that sees only suffering; without salvation or at least the possibility of salvation, of something more than just this life, this life would be unbearable. Wayfarer still hopes to find something somewhere through reading, whereas you think the only answer is to cease breeding. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that is because he believes in a life hereafter, that there is an overarching spiritual purpose, whereas you don't.
Its true that Schopenhauers philosophy is described as pessimistic, but he never said those things. And he did say that there could be freedom from suffering. Maybe a good place to start would be the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry which has been cited a number of times in this thread.
We know nothing better than we know our own will. If the world is will, then there is nothing we couldnt know about the world. Kants epistemic limitation disappears.
While it may indeed be a credible philosophy on its own, it is an altogether illegitimate transfer of conceptual correspondence when juxtaposed to Kant.
Thanks for your suggestion. I find Schopenhauer a very interesting philosopher, but have not read any of his books yet. The pessimistic remarks I heard about him was from my philosophy lecturer in my 1st year in the university. We heard him saying it, and even made notes on the paper at the time I vividly recall. I cannot prove if Schopenhauer really said it, or was it just the lecturer's idea on him. I have a little book somewhere by Schopenhauer called "On The Suffering of the World". Will get it out, and start reading it. :)
"What does Schopenhauer say about death?
Schopenhauer interprets death as the aim and purpose of life. He maintains that to live is to suffer, that the triumph of death is inevitable, and that existence is a constant dying." - Google
He sounds awfully pessimistic even in quick Google search.
I used to think Schopenhauer disagreed with Kant in many areas, and just mentioned Kant's "Thing-in-Itself" to criticise him, and clarify for his points.
I have frequent problems understanding my will. What I want is often in conflict with what I think I should do.
Sure. But I was wondering if it would be even more interesting if his idealism and pessimism could be studied together i.e. what was the ground for his arriving at the pessimism. Could his idealism had contributed to his pessimism? or the other way around?
True enough, and the bane of humanity in general. That notwithstanding, if you ever come to know what you shall do, or what you shall not do, then you must have understood your own will.
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Quoting Corvus
. For as the world is in one aspect entirely idea, so in another it is entirely will. A reality which is neither of these two, but an object in itself (into which the thing in itself has unfortunately dwindled in the hands of Kant), is the phantom of a dream, and its acceptance is an ignus fatuus in philosophy.
So, yeah, one might call that a criticism.
:100:
Thanks for your recommendation. I was going to try philsophising from my own reason and reason alone for a while, but I think I better pull out all my old philosophy books from the cupboard again. :) I am sure I have a few Schopenhauer books including his main text books in 2 volumns.
I mean this argument parallels the OP of this discussion no? How can you refer to something that is inherently ineffable? I need to designate the concept, and one of the ways to do that is to say that something exists, but there is no epistemological viewer of said events (view from nowhere).
Quoting Janus
I can't speak for @Wayfarer, but he seems to believe in the Buddhist idea of karmic cycle and that to escape from the cycle one has to reach Nirvana so that they are not reborn. In a less religious-sounding way, I think he thinks that identity of self is a delusion compounded by our ego's desires. When we reach enlightenment, we cease to identify as this or that person who is attached to this or that worldly desires. He thinks this sublime state is possible, and I am skeptical. If it is anything at all, it is some sort of ego-death but nothing on some karmic spiritual level. And hence, in a way, he agrees more with Schopenhauer's notion of "denying the will" through reaching a supreme state of total will-lessness, I guess.
Contra that notion, I don't see any spiritual significance in the ascetic practice more than habits of mind, more akin to cleaning your house to feel less cluttered. In other words, it's a coping mechanism like many others, and also alike with many others. I also point out that event if we take this mystical idea seriously that some sublime Nirvana state is obtainable, it doesn't get rid of the karmic cycle itself, just the individual's cycle. Now, Mahayana technically has a solution in the Bodhisattva, but that only helps a few more people and still doesn't fix the cycle itself.
Contra all of that notion, there is something we can do to help people not suffer in the first place, and that is simply not procreate. That simple "negative act" (not doing something), will prevent a new person's experience of suffering. Now you can say that the criticism I had of Buddhism can be leveled here. That is to say, you can say that preventing your own children's birth isn't going to prevent all birth, and animals continue, etc. However, my point with that criticism is that Buddhism and Schopenhauer had an idea that something like suicide or perhaps even not procreating, doesn't "solve" the problem of suffering because Suffering itself still continues. My point was that Buddhism and Schopenhauer's notion of Nirvana has the same issue. Except, whereas empirically, we cannot prove that this state of Nirvana is true, we can 100% empirically know that we did not procreate someone who would then suffer.
However, antinatalism is not the same as Pessimism per se. It is one ethical argument that may come out of it. There is also what to do once we are already here. To this I think we can have some sort of communal catharsis. That is, it actually does mean people have to have the right understanding in order to have a sense of the situation. Antinatalism is not just the action of not breeding but is a marker for the "lament of life". And thus, it is this attitude that I am saying is the right view of things. To get to the level of ennui. As Hartmann described here:
That is to say some sort of communal recognition of the situation. That is we must exhaust the idea of progress, scientific enthusiasm, pleasures, and happiness in this life to understand the situation and come to a sort of resignation. Unlike Hartmann though, I don't think it necessarily has to be Nirvana, but maybe a sort of quietude and recognition that it's "all vanity".
Right understanding through a communal catharsis will then take away the barriers of optimism. It would be a recognition that suffering is real and inherent in the human condition. That we resolve not to start it for others. That we empathize with the suffering of others and let others grieve that suffering, helping find solutions. In this sense, Schopenhauer's "compassion" and "empathy" is the correct foundation for a "positive ethics" (actions to perform instead of prevent). But this kind of foundation is only done out of seeing others as "fellow-sufferers". I can't emphasize that enough. In our hedonistic culture we are inculcated and bombarded with optimistic slogans. But these simply become an impediment to the true understanding of the inevitability and pervasiveness, in fact inherent quality that suffering has in the human condition. That is why Buddhism and Schopenhauer's understanding of suffering isn't "just" hedonic calculus but is a deeper sense of dissatisfaction that is even had when we are supposedly hedonically not harmed. And thus, since it is inherent, we must recognize it which means taking the empathetic pessimistic stance of compassion.
I confess never to having gotten through the entire volume. I find most of what resonates with me in the very first sections, but I'm pressing ahead. (Currently reading the section on the Ideas.)
Here are some other resources: Project Gutenberg Online Version - both the HTML and .pdf versions are good.
Analytic idealist Bernardo Kastrup has a good current title Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics, you can find his intro page to it here. (Notice that Kastrup is very critical of another frequently-mentioned book by Christopher Janaway. I pay heed to Kastrup in this matter, as he like Schopenhauer is a philosophical idealist.)
I've also mentioned another title I've discovered, a 2014 book by the name of Schopenhauer's Compass by Urs App. Can't sing its praises too highly, it's written entirely from primary sources including Schopenhauer's margin notes and correspondence, and situates him in his intellectual milieu.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I was drawn to Buddhism through my youthful conviction that there really was such a state as enlightenment. This was in the late 60's and there was a lot of that in the air. The Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Alan Watts had an actual television show. Over many later years I formed the view that Buddhism had the most credible offering ('Hinduism stripped for export' was Watts' description). Of course with the wisdom of hindsight I now recognise the immaturity of my quest, and the naive belief in 'instant enlightenment' which seemed to be the message of popular Zen (and also learned a lot more about Alan Watts' life and times :roll: .) But I did have a genuine conversion experience (or several) in those days (although of course, this never turns out to be the 'ending of suffering' by a very long shot.) Nevertheless some of these realisations were both cathartic and impactful. So, while far from any 'sublime state', it really had the concrete impact of making me less self-centered. It's perhaps not coincidental that around this time (early 80's) I married and had children. Recently I read the free intro to Evan Thompson's Why I'm Not a Buddhist , and I agree with him that designating oneself 'Buddhist' is often a kind of conceit for us middle-class moderns. And I'm currently not part of an active sangha, although that might change. But I definitely part with the various philosophers (Mainlander, von Hartmann) cited in this thread, as I believe the original premise of the Buddha that there is an ending of suffering that is not mere non-existence.
Apparently, you understand this quite differently than I do. The way I see it the indeterminate can be referred to even though it cannot be described. Designating the concept as I see it consists in saying that the indeterminate exists, but cannot be known or described, and that there is no imaginable possible (embodied) viewer. It still makes the most sense to me to say that if there were an infinite view (as opposed to our finite views) of anything it would be a view from everywhere, that is from all possible distances and directions all at once. That it could be said that this view is a view from nowhere in particular seems reasonable to me, but the idea of a view from nowhere, a view which is not a view at all, doesn't. But I acknowledge that's just me: I don't imagine that we must all see things the same way; individuals are unique, so why would their ways of seeing and understanding not also be unique?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think identity is merely formal, and becomes a delusion only when reified as a notion of a fixed transcendent being (substance); otherwise, it is simply useful, indeed indispensable, for finding our way in the world.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I see it as likely being a possibility, as an altered state in this life, but I am not convinced it can be achieved permanently or that my consciousness will survive the death of the body. That said I am not confident enough to deny an afterlife, but for me, since it can only be a distant possibility it cannot be a worthy life pursuit. There are too many other fascinating things to do and discover while alive, while I have this all to brief opportunity, and if there is anything that comes after this life, I'll worry about that if and when it arises, or if not, I obviously won't worry at all.
The quoted passage about Hartmann is interesting and I think somewhat along those lines. One of the most common pursuits of happiness is having children and becoming part of a family. As I've said I was never drawn to that, but I don't believe that anyone who longs for that will ever be convinced by anti-natalist arguments, so, even if I agreed with antinatalism as a universal ideal I would still see the mission of convincing people not to breed as a futile waste of time and energy.
If everyone stopped having children today society, civilization as we know it, would soon catastrophically collapse, and I don't think that could be dressed up to look like a desirable outcome for virtually anyone, other than perhaps a few who would like to return to hunter/ gatherer life. If I was twenty years old right now that might attract me, but I am almost seventy, and the idea has little appeal to me.
In any case, I say with utmost confidence that people will continue to have children, so unless catastrophic collapse is forced on us, people will continue to breed as usual. Even if society collapsed quite a few would probably survive and return to hunter/ gatherer or rudimentary agricultural life, and they would certainly breed, if only because they would have no further access to contraceptives.
Great resource links. Thanks !!
I have managed to find my old Schopenhauer books along with the other philosophy books, Greek philosophy, Kant, Hegel, Hume, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein ....
1. The World as Will and Representation Vol. 1 & 2 - translated by E.F.J. Payne 1969 Dover Publications NYC
2. Schopenhauer - On the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will by John Atwell.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Schopenhauer-Character-World-Metaphysics-Will/dp/0520087704
3. Schopenhauer by Julian Young, Routledge, 2005 Oxford UK
4. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee 1983 Clarendon Press Oxford UK
I am glad that I still have above books. I lost interest on readings lately, but seems I could go back to the readings again.