Schopenhauer's Transcendental Idealism
I've been discussing this privately until now (@Heister Eggcart will now know what all this space talk is for >:O ), but I'm interested to get more ideas on the subject, so I'm coming out with it. As is known Schopenhauer borrows and adapts Kant's Transcendental Idealism, reducing the categories to (1) space, (2) time and (3) causality. Both Schopenhauer and Kant take space to be an a priori form of representation, applied by the cognitive faculties to the senses. They understand this to mean that the propositions of geometry are synthetic a priori judgements, and are therefore apodeictic - certain.
Schopenhauer follows Kant in conceiving of space (and geometry - the study of space) as transcendentally ideal:
"Perception, partly pure a priori, as establishing mathematics, partly empirical a posteriori as establishing all the other sciences [...] We demand the reduction of every logical proof to one of perception. Mathematics, on the contrary, is at great pains deliberately to reject the evidence of perception peculiar to it and everywhere at hand, in order to substitute for it logical evidence. We must look upon this as being like a man who cuts off his legs in order to walk on crutches [...] Whoever denies the necessity, intuitively presented, of the space-relations expressed in any proposition, can with equal right deny the axioms, the following of the conclusion from the premises, or even the principle of contradiction itself, for all these relations are equally indemonstrable, immediately evident, and knowable a priori" - Schopenhauer WWR Vol I §14-15
Now Schopenhauer's ontological idealism (and I refer here to the phenomenon/noumenon distinction largely) critically requires that the stage on which experience occurs be transcendentally ideal, for this stage being transcendentally ideal is what enables experience to be called the veil of Maya - appearance - and hence necessitates the noumenon, the thing-in-itself. Without space, time and causality (which constitute the stage in/on which experience occurs) being transcendentally ideal, the distinction between noumenon/phenomenon is in danger, as is idealism - for if at least part of the stage on which experience occurs is real, then Schopenhauer's ontological idealism is false.
Schopenhauer laughed at mathematicians trying to prove Euclid's Fifth Postulate, thinking that it is known from pure perception a priori:
"In fact, it seems to me that the logical method is in this way reduced to an absurdity. But it is precisely through the controversies over this, together with the futile attempts to demonstrate the directly certain as merely indirectly certain, that the independence and clearness of intuitive evidence appear in contrast with the uselessness and difficulty of logical proof, a contrast as instructive as it is amusing. The direct certainty will not be admitted here, just because it is no merely logical certainty following from the concept, and thus resting solely on the relation of predicate to subject, according to the principle of contradiction. But that eleventh axiom [11th axiom is equivalent in the context of Euclidean geometry with Euclid's Fifth Postulate] regarding parallel lines is a synthetic proposition a priori, and as such has the guarantee of pure, not empirical, perception; this perception is just as immediate and certain as is the principle of contradiction itself, from which all proofs originally derive their certainty. At bottom this holds good of every geometrical theorem" - Schopenhauer WWR Vol II §8
Non-Euclidean geometry came along, and it turns out that we have empirical proof that Euclid's Fifth Postulate is actually false, with regards to space as investigated by physics. Now the curvature of space cannot be perceived - we perceive objects in space - things in space curve - but how can space itself curve - that is anathema to our perception. What does this mean for Schopenhauer? Well for one, Euclid's Fifth Postulate isn't apodeictic, and neither is it a priori - contrary to what Schopenhauer thought. So Schopenhauer was wrong at least about this one truth of mathematics, and if he was wrong about this one, why should the other mathematical propositions that he was certain of be anymore certain than this? Indeed, it is his method that is wrong. Grounding mathematical propositions in a priori perception without appeal to experience is wrong. As Einstein said:
More importantly, there is one feature of space - its non-Euclideanness which is NOT a synthetic a priori, but rather a synthetic a posteriori, and therefore not transcendentally ideal, but empirically real - for it takes experience (physical experiments) for us to know of it. This means that at least part of the stage on which experiences occur isn't imposed on reality as a structure by our cognitive faculties, but rather is empirically real. If part of the stage is empirically real, then Schopenhauer's ontological idealism falls apart.
Can Schopenhauer's transcendental idealism and ontological idealism, along with the phenomenon/noumenon distinction be saved? Please note discussions of Kant's Transcendental Idealism with regards to non-Euclidean geometry isn't under question here - just Schopenhauer's.
Kant:
Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. For in order that certain sensations be referred to something outside me (that is, to something in another region of space from that in which I find myself), and similarly in order that I may be able to represent them as outside and alongside one another, and accordingly as not only different but as in different places, the representation of space must already underlie them. Therefore, the representation of space cannot be obtained through experience from the relations of outer appearance; this outer experience is itself possible at all only through that representation
Kant:Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind’s nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally
Kant:Space is a necessary a priori representation that underlies all outer intuitions. One can never forge a representation of the absence of space, though one can quite well think that no things are to be met within it. It must therefore be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a determination dependent upon them, and it is an a priori representation that necessarily underlies outer appearances.
Kant:Space is not a discursive, or as one says, general concept of relations of things in general, but a pure intuition. For, firstly, one can represent only one space, and if one speaks of many spaces, one thereby understands only parts of one and the same unique space. These parts cannot precede the one all-embracing space as being, as it were, constituents out of which it can be composed, but can only be thought as in it. It is essentially one; the manifold in it, and therefore also the general concept of spaces, depends solely on limitations. It follows from this that an a priori intuition (which is not empirical) underlies all concepts of space. Similarly, geometrical propositions, that, for instance, in a triangle two sides together are greater than the third, can never be derived from the general concepts of line and triangle, but only from intuition and indeed a priori with apodeictic certainty
Schopenhauer follows Kant in conceiving of space (and geometry - the study of space) as transcendentally ideal:
"Perception, partly pure a priori, as establishing mathematics, partly empirical a posteriori as establishing all the other sciences [...] We demand the reduction of every logical proof to one of perception. Mathematics, on the contrary, is at great pains deliberately to reject the evidence of perception peculiar to it and everywhere at hand, in order to substitute for it logical evidence. We must look upon this as being like a man who cuts off his legs in order to walk on crutches [...] Whoever denies the necessity, intuitively presented, of the space-relations expressed in any proposition, can with equal right deny the axioms, the following of the conclusion from the premises, or even the principle of contradiction itself, for all these relations are equally indemonstrable, immediately evident, and knowable a priori" - Schopenhauer WWR Vol I §14-15
Now Schopenhauer's ontological idealism (and I refer here to the phenomenon/noumenon distinction largely) critically requires that the stage on which experience occurs be transcendentally ideal, for this stage being transcendentally ideal is what enables experience to be called the veil of Maya - appearance - and hence necessitates the noumenon, the thing-in-itself. Without space, time and causality (which constitute the stage in/on which experience occurs) being transcendentally ideal, the distinction between noumenon/phenomenon is in danger, as is idealism - for if at least part of the stage on which experience occurs is real, then Schopenhauer's ontological idealism is false.
Schopenhauer laughed at mathematicians trying to prove Euclid's Fifth Postulate, thinking that it is known from pure perception a priori:
"In fact, it seems to me that the logical method is in this way reduced to an absurdity. But it is precisely through the controversies over this, together with the futile attempts to demonstrate the directly certain as merely indirectly certain, that the independence and clearness of intuitive evidence appear in contrast with the uselessness and difficulty of logical proof, a contrast as instructive as it is amusing. The direct certainty will not be admitted here, just because it is no merely logical certainty following from the concept, and thus resting solely on the relation of predicate to subject, according to the principle of contradiction. But that eleventh axiom [11th axiom is equivalent in the context of Euclidean geometry with Euclid's Fifth Postulate] regarding parallel lines is a synthetic proposition a priori, and as such has the guarantee of pure, not empirical, perception; this perception is just as immediate and certain as is the principle of contradiction itself, from which all proofs originally derive their certainty. At bottom this holds good of every geometrical theorem" - Schopenhauer WWR Vol II §8
Non-Euclidean geometry came along, and it turns out that we have empirical proof that Euclid's Fifth Postulate is actually false, with regards to space as investigated by physics. Now the curvature of space cannot be perceived - we perceive objects in space - things in space curve - but how can space itself curve - that is anathema to our perception. What does this mean for Schopenhauer? Well for one, Euclid's Fifth Postulate isn't apodeictic, and neither is it a priori - contrary to what Schopenhauer thought. So Schopenhauer was wrong at least about this one truth of mathematics, and if he was wrong about this one, why should the other mathematical propositions that he was certain of be anymore certain than this? Indeed, it is his method that is wrong. Grounding mathematical propositions in a priori perception without appeal to experience is wrong. As Einstein said:
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality
More importantly, there is one feature of space - its non-Euclideanness which is NOT a synthetic a priori, but rather a synthetic a posteriori, and therefore not transcendentally ideal, but empirically real - for it takes experience (physical experiments) for us to know of it. This means that at least part of the stage on which experiences occur isn't imposed on reality as a structure by our cognitive faculties, but rather is empirically real. If part of the stage is empirically real, then Schopenhauer's ontological idealism falls apart.
Can Schopenhauer's transcendental idealism and ontological idealism, along with the phenomenon/noumenon distinction be saved? Please note discussions of Kant's Transcendental Idealism with regards to non-Euclidean geometry isn't under question here - just Schopenhauer's.
Comments (378)
I had the idea that Schopenhauer disagreed with Kant's usage of 'noumenon':
The World as Will and Representation(vol. 1, Dover edition 1966, ISBN 0-486-21761-2 p. 476-477)
I would also question the metaphor of the intuition of space as a 'stage' on which 'things occur'.
The metaphor isn't central. Space, time and causality form the framework in which representation necessarily occurs, according to Schopenhauer. This framework is provided by the cognitive faculty, and is not empirically real.
As I remember it his disagreement is with the notion of 'noumena' (plurality). For Schopenhauer it it should be understood as noumenon (singular=the Will). However, in relation to this in another thread Mongrel writes:
"He did want to say that the thing-in-itself is the Will, but he later backed off of that and agreed with Kant that it's unknowable."
I have no doubt that Mongrel is more familiar with Schopenhauer's philosophy than I am.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree. I think the OP is off-target with the idea that non-Euclidean geometries have any bearing on the validity of human a priori intuitions about the nature of space. The latter are certainly valid when it comes to perceptual space. We can describe non-Euclidean spaces mathematically and, obviously, geometrically, but we cannot visualize, for example, curvature of 3D space, and understand the idea non-mathematically, only in terms of analogies to curvature of 2D surfaces.
What the ontological significance of the existence of non-Euclidean geometries might be is not itself an uncontroversial matter.
So it seems you see no problem with a priori intuitions being false. In trying to save Schopenhauer, you're already on the run - re-treating to saying something merely about human perception and not reality - which is what Schopenhauer and Kant have been attempting to do all along.
Did Schopenhauer mean that the truths of geometry are true only in-so-far as our perception goes? Or did he hold that, since our cognitive faculties structure the world via space, time and causality - these form the very structure of the world, and hence are apodeictic, and cannot be wrong or disproven empirically? Indeed it is this which makes them synthetic a priori judgements - their truth doesn't depend on experience.
This is not a thread for discussing Kant's transcendental idealism - that should have been clear. You do perceive non-Euclidean space. Not directly. But you perceive its effects. If space is shaped as a sphere, you could drop an egg here, walk in a straight line, and return to the egg. That is perceiving space to be non-Euclidean. What you mean is that you cannot see space itself curving. But that is obvious - you'd need 4D eyes to see your 3D space curving. All that tells us is that our perception is limited and we have blind spots.
Quoting John
I hate dealing with such misrepresentations as these - how is space as given in perception even Euclidean to begin with? Parallel lines in perception do meet at the horizon - just like parallel lines meet at the vanishing point in a painting. So perceptual space isn't even Euclidean to begin with. Our intuition of space - which isn't the same thing as perceptual space - is Euclidean.
This is obviously a false assumption to make.
Which one?
That humans can't conceptualize curved space.
Thoronkill, Schopenpower1, darthbarrasputum to name a few, I think.
I know I certainly can't. Maybe I'm lacking something.
Maybe I should add "normal humans". Then there are the John Von Neumann's...
Curved relative to what?
You tell me. I suspect curved relative to distant objects occupying the space-time continuum.
This is a curve. What are we using the x-y axes for?
Yes that is true, but I've already been discussing with him. He is indeed the only one I'm aware of who is highly knowledgeable in the metaphysics of Schopenhauer
Quoting Heister Eggcart
These two may be knowledgeable in Schopenhauer, but they are more pessimists, than they are transcendental idealists :P
But we can conceptualise it very easily. We can't imagine it perceptually, but that's another story.
Y is time and X is space :-O - but what happens if the x, y, z axis are space, and time is the m axis ;) ? Can you see that? A system with four axes.
Curved in a 4th dimension, obviously.
In addition to those three, @The Great Whatever also deserves a mention. While he has moved beyond Schopenhauer, he has read him and has good understanding.
Or Eckhart Meister? >:O In either case, I have no doubt about that lol - I never read either one.
Sorry, my math skills ended at Calc III and so with it my hopes of becoming an engineer. Wish I got to do the fun stuff, like linear algebra...
This is nonsense. We know via perception that parallel lines never really meet. Think of railway lines; they never meet and it would be disastrous if they did. You are conflating the idea that due to perspective effects parallel lines are perceived to appear to meet at the horizon, with the very different and erroneous idea that they are actually perceived to meet.
Okay, then I seemingly misunderstand the way you are using perception. Would you like to define it more clearly, so that I can make future arguments based on it? Is perception what appears in my visual/sensory fields? If not, then what is perception in the way you use it?
What about Maggotsino and Shyster Eggfart? If you don't have a good understanding of Schopenhauer yourself how could you possibly tell whether others do or not? :s
Perception encompasses all the sensory modalities, including the somato-sensory and proprioception; it is not restricted to the merely visual, obviously.
Quoting Agustino
Yes, hence visual/sensory fields
The reason behind this thread is that Schopenhauer makes it clear in WWR that space, time and causality cannot apply to the thing-in-itself - indeed space time and causality apply only to the phenomenon/representation which is constituted through the principium individuationis. This for me is the only interesting transcendental idealism - Kant's is too shy, because Kant allows for a noumenal space, Schopenhauer doesn't. But if non-Euclidean geometry is the case, then there appears to be something to space that is not given directly in perception a priori - there appears that there is a noumenal space - this is catastrophic for Schopenhauer.
OK, but that still doesn't change the fact that you were conflating the truth that parallel lines are perceived to appear to converge due to perspective effect, with the falsehood that they are they are perceived to actually converge.
Quoting Agustino
Non-Euclidean spaces are nonetheless, insofar as they are spaces at all, and not merely mathematical models, spaces imagined (however limitedly) by us, and so speak no more to what is in itself than our 'normal' perceptions and intuitions do. So, I'm still not really seeing your point.
Sure. But how do we have such knowledge? Is it synthetic a priori as per Schopenhauer/Kant? Do we perceive non-Euclideanness in a priori perception? If we don't, as you have already said we don't, then there is a big problem. Where is the non-Euclideanness coming from? It's clearly not a form imposed by our cognitive faculties, because if it was, then we'd be able to see it in perception a priori...
I would say the "non-Euclideanness" as an ontological assertion, is coming from, for one example at least, the fact that we interpret some actual observations, such as the gravitational lensing effect, that was predicted by Einstein's adaptations of Riemannian geometry (if I remember right) to be confirmations that space can be 'warped' by mass. But I would say that we really have no idea what that could mean, because we cannot visualize such a thing. And even if we could visualize such a thing we could not be at all certain in extending it to be any kind of absolute or transcendental ontological claim.
We cannot perceive what it would be, because that would entail having 4D eyes. But - we can perceive what it is by analogy to other dimensions (and hence we can conceive it). Imagine you are a 2D creature, just width and length, living on a flat piece of paper. You have only two degrees of freedom - left/right and forward/backward. So you move on the piece of paper - the flat paper is an Euclidean surface. Now imagine that your flat piece of paper is folded in the 3rd dimension, such that it forms a cylinder. You drop a rectangle at your starting position, and then you walk in a straight line in the direction in which the paper was folded. If you keep walking, you will return and stumble over the rectangle which you initially dropped. This is a direct effect of the non-Euclideanness of your space, which you can perceive - by walking in a straight, not curved line, you return to your starting position. So there is nothing inconceivable about non-Euclideanness.
Furthermore, I'm not saying that it says something about the ontological nature of space. I'm simply pointing a fact that Schopenhauer doesn't seem able to account for the non-Euclideanness of space as it is not an a priori perception generated synthetically through a form our cognitive faculties impose on us - this only raises the question, where does it come from? And at least one part of space is not transcendentally ideal, and therefore, it can only be empirically real.
You are making an appearance/reality distinction again here. So is this a pheonemon/noumenon distinction then? You are using your terms in a very strange way it seems to me at least. We perceive that they actually converge, just by looking at them. We need to move and change our position etc. to understand that our vision is "tricking" us due to our perspective. Then we conceive of how space really is, behind the appearances. But these distinctions don't fit in Schopenhauer's project at all.
http://www.friesian.com/penrose.htm
:-} I have read Schopenhauer's WWR Vol I and II, On the Fourfold Root, and numerous works on him like Bryan Magee's, etc.
You should stop with this retardedness - it's getting below the minimum level of decency expected of someone.
Again why does that matter? You post things which are really irrelevant to the thread that is going on. Yes, the fact that non-Euclidean geometries are conceivable logically has never been under discussion. There is a reason why I said I'm talking about Schopenhauer's transcendental idealism and not Kant's. You can save Kant by saying that perceptual space is Euclidean (just like John says) but actual space can be different. For Schopenhauer, there is no space apart from perceptual space. Space doesn't apply to the thing-in-itself. So only the phenomenon is structured by the a priori form of space - the a priori form of space - read that again. So if perceptual space is Euclidean, and perceptual space is all there is - where do we get non-Euclideanism from? Indeed it should be impossible for non-Euclideanism to exist - at least seemingly - Schopenhauer himself states:
Really Wayfarer, engage with the actual discussion. We're not talking about Kant's transcendental idealism at all. Schopenhauer says that denying the parallel postulate is like denying the principle of contradiction. Right there - I quoted it for you. See that? Now contribute to the discussion, and get off the ivory tower from which you throw unrelated links and the like.
If it's not, I'll but out and go back to earning a living. X-)
Well, one of them is named after him, darth seems to bring him in a lot, so he's at least read him, and Thoro seems to have a hardon for him, so I dunno. If I'm wrong, then they can let me know >:O
If HE can come up with spoofy names for others then why should such names not be invented for himself and you?
Saying you have read works and displaying understanding of them are two very different things. I admit I am not very familiar with Schopenhauer, so I can't really judge your understanding of his philosophy, but you have previously claimed to understand Hegel, with whom I am very familiar, and yet displayed poor understanding of his philosophy, and that fact, coupled with the general paucity of intellectual sophistication displayed by your posts does not inspire much confidence in me as to your general philosophical acumen.
Of course that's just my opinion, but it is my honest opinion, and I'm neither trying to offend you nor spare your feelings. If such critique helps you, then good; if not, what can I do? If it does no more than offend you, then taking into account your generally obnoxious style, so full of straw dogs and ad hominems, then I simply couldn't care less.
Start from the proposition that space is purely conceptual. It doesn't have to be Euclidean, it doesn't have to be any particular way at all, it is however we as the conceptualizers, make it to be. For example, the circle doesn't have to be 360 degrees, it doesn't have to be divided into four right angles, or anything like that. Human beings chose to do this. They chose to do this because they had a system of numbers, and they wanted to apply the number system to the sensible world, in measurement. So they produced geometry in order to apply numbers in measurement.
Now we have a concept of "space" which has been constructed through the use of geometry. You talk about the "non-Euclideanness of space", but all this means is that you opt for a conception of space which is non-Euclidean. Why would you opt for such a conception? Well, if Euclidean geometry proved to be inadequate for certain activities of applying mathematics to the sensible world, in measurement, then we would have to produce a Non-Euclidean geometry which was adequate. This geometry would produce a non-Euclidean concept of space, and so, the non-Euclideanness of space.
So the question of where does the non-Euclideanness of space come from, is answered with "it comes from the inadequacies of the Euclidean concept of space to fulfil our purposes of measurement". We do not need to make any judgements about whether or not space is "empirically real", all we need to judge is whether or not our geometry (and therefore concept of space), is adequate for measuring the aspects of the world which we judge to be empirically real.
No it's really simple: some of our immediate perceptions tell us that parallel lines appear to converge, and in their broader, more inclusive, scope our perceptions tells us that they do not actually converge, or even appear to converge when we are properly placed in relation to them. It's somewhat like the situation with the bent stick in water. The stick appears bent, so you can say that our visual perception tells us that, but our broader perceptual experience (when we feel the stick or take it out of the water, for example) tells us that the stick is not bent.
No, that's odd; I can control it. Perhaps that's too much information... but you made the erroneous claim...
O:)
Besides, to say that someone has a hardon for something suggests much more than a merely transient randomly appearing tumescence (which they perhaps truly cannot totally control) and suggests something more like a cultivated yearning for something (which they certainly should be able to control, particularly if they wish to be, or become, celibate).
I do recommend abstaining from Schopenhauer, by the way. Kant seems far better and not intrinsically different when it comes to what matters. From the little reading I have done of and about his work, Schopenhauer's differences from Kant certainly seem to matter to him, but are really not of much significance. This is to say that the parts of his philosophy which differ substantially from Kant's are not actually philosophically interesting, or at least I have never come across any presentation or explanation of them that makes them seem interesting to me. I am open to being convinced otherwise, though.
Quoting Agustino
No, it should read: "But, we can conceive ('perceive' is quite simply the wrong term here) what it is by analogy to other dimensions (and hence we can conceive it). Unfortunately, this is a vacuous tautology.
>:O I never claimed to have thorough knowledge of Hegel. Hegel is not Aristotle, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Pascal, Schopenhauer, Hamann, Kant, Aquinas, Eric Voegelin, or any other philosopher that I have a thorough understanding of. I've read parts of the Pheno and secondary works about Hegel. Never devoted much time to studying the man because his philosophy doesn't interest me that much. Much ado about nothing. If you're so keen maybe I lend you my copies of WWR with notes on every page and highlightings - Schopenhauer is infinitely rich and eminently worth studying - i have to read 50 pages of Hegel to find even one insight. With Schopenhauer they are on every page.
As for intellectual paucity - you should have a look in the mirror - you claim to have studied Spinoza for years and your knowledge of him is piss poor >:O
Right, so you should be able to present a list of, say, about ten of Schopenhauer's original and unique insights then. Can't wait to read them.
First you should watch for that prickly and arrogant attitude of yours. I'm under no obligation to provide you with anything, especially while you lack respect.
Just two - (because I don't feel like indulging in your childish nonsense) - I open the WWR Volume I randomly and look at just that page.
"For property, that is not taken from a person without wrong, can, in view of our explanation of wrong, be only what is made by his own powers. Therefore by taking this, we take the powers of his body from the will objectified in it, in order to make them serve the will objectified in another body. For only in this way does the wrongdoer, by seizing not another's body, but an inanimate thing entirely different from it, break into the sphere of another's affirmation of will, since the powers, the work of another's body, are, so to speak, incorporated in, and identified with, this thing [...] 'Wise men who know olden times declare that a cultivated field is the property of him who cut down the wood and cleared and ploughed the land, just as an antelope belongs to the first hunter who mortally wounds her'" (page 334)
"Therefore the man of genius requires imagination, in order to see in things not what nature has actually formed, but what she endeavoured to form, yet did not bring about, because of the conflict of her forms with one another, which was referred to in the previous book [...] The imagination extends the mental horizon of the genius beyond the objects that actually present themselves to his person, as regards both quality and quantity" (page 185)
Literarily every page has markings and notings. Literarily. Schopenhauer has the greatest and at least for certain the most ambitious philosophical system ever attempted, even more ambitious than Spinoza. If it wasn't for my doubts with regards to transcendental idealism as S expounds it, then definitely his achievement would be unparalleled in the whole history of philosophy.
Oh yeah, I'm sure you can John. Granted by the fact that you can't even control your mouth, I have high doubts about your capacity to control something else.
Quoting John
Kant is thoroughly confused and muddled up. Schopenhauer clarifies and redeems Kant for the most part, while also in some way maybe also critically deforming the Kantian project. In either case, Schopenhauer is encyclopaedic in the way K will never hope to be.
This implies that there may be no such thing as pure a priori. Perhaps only time will prove to be purely a priori. I think that Kant allows that geometry and spatial concepts are a priori. Schopenhauer may have wanted to limit the pure a priori to mathematics. Ironically it is the existence of the pure a priori which necessitates the assumption of the noumenon (noumena), because this is what transcends experience. By confining, limiting, that which transcends experience, we get closer and closer to the noumenon itself.
Yes kind of. For Schopenhauer, what necessitates the assumption of the noumenon is the fact that experience occurs on a stage which is ideal and not real. So the question arises as to what lies behind the curtain so to speak. If space, time and causality are ideal, then all of experience, which is structured by these, becomes mere phenomenon. So the structure of experience is ideal, but the content must be real. Therefore what is the source of this content? The thing-in-itself as it manifests within the categories of space, time and causality. The Will is the closest we get to thing-in-itself, because the Will is outside of space and causality, but not outside of time. We find ourselves willing so and so; nothing causes it. And neither is our will as we experience it subjectively in space. But our will is in time - one movement of the will occurs after another. These are obviously paraphrased for what Schopenhauer says, which is a lot more nuanced, than my brief and very downgraded remarks here.
Also the thing-in-itself is not a plural - this is indeed incoherent, as the categories of space, time and causality which together form the principle of individuation (hence plurality) do not apply to the thing-in-itself.
If we take the Platonic route, we resolve this problem by making the ideal the real. Now the stage, which is the ideal, is what is real, and the sense world is illusionary.
Quoting Agustino
Next we have the issue of content. Under the Platonic scheme, the content is no longer real. This comes out as Aristotle's "matter". The form is what is real, and matter is something which we need to assume the existence of, in order to make change intelligible. So as much as "the structure of experience" is real, it is only intelligible through the assumption of matter, which is not real, it is only assumed. Content is assumed in order to make experience intelligible.
Quoting Agustino
Under this model then, the source of the content is the mind itself, matter is an assumption, it is purely theoretical, produced by the mind itself. Matter, content, is what the mind creates.
Quoting Agustino
Now we are nearly consistent with Schopenhauer, the thing-in-itself, matter, content, is what is created by the mind. Schopenhauer may represent it as the creative power of the mind, the Will itself. Or, as you say, the Will is "the closest we get to the thing-in-itself" We've removed Will from all spatial context, so what we can do next is to see if it has temporal context. By referring to Aristotle's concept of matter, which has now become consistent with mental content, as subject matter, we find that this concept refers to that which violates the law of excluded middle. It is what may or may not be, potential. We can give this "potential" temporal context at the present, the middle, between the past and future.
Let me first provide more detail on Schopenhauer. Now why is it important that space, time and causality are ideal? Well, their ideality explains both why they are (1) a priori, (2) synthetic, and (3) apodeictic, and hence certain. The Scholastics had trouble in proving the certainty of their principles. Why is the principle of causality certain for example? Schopenhauer answers that it is certain because it is an ideal form applied by our own mind - that also explains why the mind intuitively knows it.
So empirical reality is the domain of science. It is empirically real, and therefore worth studying. It is the external aspect of reality - one side of the coin (the other being thing-in-itself). The forms of the intellect (space, time and causality) are the study of metaphysics and theoretical mathematics (which is why metaphysics and mathematics are guaranteed certainty). The Will is the study of ethics (and metaphysics) and approaching the thing-in-itself. The thing-in-itself is the study of mysticism. The beauty of Schopenhauer's system is that it renders to all these sciences or areas of study their proper place, and also explains how it is that they are possible in the first place.
In addition, the thing-in-itself, and the mystical becomes capable of explaining different phenomena including, for example, romantic love, people's characters (character is destiny), etc. So all these elements form a gigantic explanatory framework for everything, from property to genius, to pretty much any other subject imaginable. I haven't seen any other philosophy do this, or even attempt it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If we do this, then how do we explain the certainty of mathematics? How do we explain its a priori nature and also it's non-logical, synthetic character?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What is the mind?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No you're not, because for Schopenhauer the thing-in-itself is one side of the coin, and the other is the phenomenon. Hence "World as Will and Representation". It doesn't seem like you have two sides here. That's a problem, because how will you account for mysticism, romantic love, character, etc?
Actually, I think you have contradiction here Agustino. Something which is purely ideal cannot be (2) synthetic. It's being analytic which makes it ideal, and this is what guarantees that it is apodeitic as well. Are you sure that Schopenhauer is not arguing that these ideals are analytic?
Quoting Agustino
I would not class metaphysics with mathematics here, because being concerned with ontology, metaphysics must have respect for empirical reality as well. But, as l explained earlier, mathematics itself changes and evolves in relation to what is practical, so even mathematics cannot guarantee certainty. The fact that mathematical principles have changed through the passing of time, as we have progressed with our understanding of empirical reality, demonstrates that even mathematics does not guarantee certainty.
Quoting Agustino
It may be the purpose of Schopenhauer's metaphysics to put all the areas of study in their proper place, but this itself is an empirical practise. It is a process which describes each existing science, and is therefore empirical.
Quoting Agustino
You mean non-logical analytical character don't you? The point is, that from the perspective which I described, even the absolute certainty of mathematics is revealed as an illusion. It may be the case that there is something which is a priori, in an absolute sense, the intellect, the will, the soul, God, or some such thing, but even the principles of mathematics are tainted by empirical practicality. This is why Plato is forced to posit "the good" in The Republic. The good is what makes all intelligible objects intelligible, and there is no exception here, not even mathematical objects. They are only intelligible in so far as they have a relation to the good.
Quoting Agustino
You don't see the two sides of the coin here? There's matter in the physical world, and matter as content, subject matter. They both appear to be the same thing, looked at from two distinct perspectives, two sides of the same coin. In one case we look outward into the physical world, and we find it necessary to assume "matter" to substantiate our empirical observations. In the other case, we look inward, and must assume content, subject matter, to substantiate the existence of intelligible objects, ideas. And this is where we find your mysticism, romantic love, character, etc..
We have the same "two sides" in a lesser developed way with Plato's "the good". There is "the good" in the sense of what is intended, what is desired, wanted, and this is within your mind, an ideal. Then there is "the good" as it is brought into existence in the physical world. In your mind, the good is a desired state, something to be brought into existence, what is wanted. When we act we actually bring something into existence. The intent is to bring into existence the good as it is desired, as it exists in the mind. But the action does not necessarily bring into existence that very same good which was intended, and this is the source of uncertainty. So the "two sides" are not actually two sides at all, they are two distinct things which bear the same name, "good". This is the same in the case of the assumed matter in the sensible world (thing-in -itself), and the internal subject matter, the mystical content. They are not really two sides of the same thing, they are completely distinct. The fact that we do not have here two sides of the same thing, rather two distinct things, is why we adopt a dualist metaphysics.
Yes. But perhaps I wasn't clear. I didn't mean that space, time and causality are synthetic a prioris, but rather judgements involving them. Space, time and causality are forms of the mind. The reason why, for example, the propositions of geometry are synthetic a prioris is that they involve a synthesis of perception a priori through the form of space given by our cognitive faculty. This explains the certainty we have in geometry (ignoring for now Euclid's Fifth Postulate). The propositions are synthetic because the subject does not include/contain the predicate. "The shortest distance from a line to a point not on the line is the perpendicular on the line from that point" There's nothing in the perpendicular which contains it being the shortest distance - the two concepts are obviously related, but one does not entail the other. Hence these judgements must be synthetic. What Kant/Schopenhauer do, is that they go further and claim that, instead of being a posteriori to experience, they are a priori - hence why they are certain. If they were a posteriori, they wouldn't be certain. And they can't be analytic judgements because the subject "perpendicular" does not contain the predicate "shortest distance".
I guess you'd say that the judgements of mathematics are synthetic a posterioris granted that they have been changing with experience and over time. That may be your position, but it certainly isn't Schopenhauer's, and if you do adopt that position, then the statements of mathematics lose their certainty - they could have been otherwise.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Space, time and causality are neither analytic nor synthetic - only judgements are one of the two.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, but put yourself in Schopenhauer's shoes. Euclidean geometry is capable to perfectly represent your reality in spatial terms. How is that possible? It's because the form that our mind imposes on experience (space) ensures that this is so. There is nothing to wonder about - they are certain because they are of subjective origin - they are forms through which experience itself is possible. In fact, remove those forms, and our experience itself becomes impossible. The world as representation is impossible if there is no space, time and causality. Why? Because any representation is a representation by virtue of being situated in space, time and causality. And these three are ideal - they are the structures of the mind - the forms provided by the mind.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But I'm not sure. Some parts of mathematics evolve - BUT, not all. For example, "the shortest distance from a line to a point is the perpendicular" is a judgement that is certain. How come it is certain?!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I disagree - there are mathematical judgements that are clearly certain. In fact, non-Euclideanness is a higher viewpoint, which includes and accepts Euclidean geometry as merely one of its subsets.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What do you mean to say with this?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Fine, what is the distinction between the two? Which one underlies the other? For Schopenhauer, the thing-in-itself underlies the phenomena - the thing-in-itself is the source so to speak. Phenomena are merely its manifestation.
Take character - there is both empirical character, and noumenal character. What is the difference? Empirical character is character as it shows itself in the world - in particular situations governed by the forms. BUT - noumenal character is what instantiates itself through empirical character - indeed it is noumenal character that ultimately underlies empirical character. Why does this matter? Noumenal character is unchanging - character is in this sense destiny. If someone has an ugly character, empirically this may not show - he or she may never have the opportunity to show the ugliness of their character - but this doesn't change their noumenal character - it doesn't change who they are in their heart of hearts, and who they would be only if they had the chance
To me, it seems that "matter" as used by the Platonists is unnecessary. There just is no matter, end of story.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah well said... which is tragic. It makes reality unintelligible. There is no controlling factor at all.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No the mystical is the thing-in-itself. The sensible world is merely the representation of the thing-in-itself mediated/individuated through the forms of the intellect (space, time/causality). That is why the sensible world is ultimately an illusion - the veil of Maya - merely the phenomenon of the thing-in-itself.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Disastrous! Dualism is really a disaster! It makes reality completely incoherent. How one side affects the other becomes impossible to explain. What am I really? Am I this or that? How am I both matter and subject matter? That just makes no sense. What is the necessary connection between matter and subject matter? None? Is that connection itself matter or subject matter? How is it possible that the connection is one and not the other?
No this isn't where you find them at all. They are just empty concepts in there. Bones with no meat on them.
How is Kant "confused and muddled up" ? How does Schopenhauer "clarify and redeem Kant"? It's one thing to make such sweeping claims, but they are completely vacuous unless you can provide some detail and explanation of the purported grounds upon which you make them.
The thing-in-itself may remain unknown to Schopenhauer - unknown philosophically, but not mystically. Many occurrences reveal the thing-in-itself - romantic love being one of them - but these experiences resist conceptualisation, and hence remain forever out of the grasp of philosophy.
The first passage, as far as I can tell, basically just says that a person earns the right to own property by work. I'm pretty sure that idea was expounded by Locke, and I'm not sure he was the first either. Perhpas you can poiint to what you ( presumably) think I have missed in this passage.
The second passage reads like an unjustified romantic paean to the potent powers of genius. I'm not seeing anything great or even insightful in these passages, They only confirm my previous opinion that Schopenhauer was somewhat of a philosophical hack (although nonetheless a very good writer and encyclopedic mind) who basically repeated Kant's philosophy with a few changes (like subsuming the twelve categories to Causality) and threw in some Upanishadic mysticism and Buddhistic pessimism. I haven't bothered reading Schopenhauer much beyond his Wisdom of Life and Counsels, a couple of secondary works (one by McGee which I found fairly superficial and romanticised) and some of WWR which I could never really sink my teeth into, because it seemed to lack any of the kinds of cogent insights of Kant and Hegel.So my impression has long been that Kant and Hegel are philosophers of far greater stature than Schopenhauer, and nothing you have quoted here has done anything to change that opinion.
At least Spinoza presented a more or less cohesive system (although not without its inconsistencies). A glaring problem with Schopenhauer's system, so far as I understand it, is that although he proposes a dualistic ontology of Will and Representation, he also tries to incorporate Platonic Ideas as something like universal forms governing the process of individuation from undifferentiated will to differentiated representation, but he seems to give no account of whether they are part of Will (noumenon) or part of Representation (phenomenon). It seems that, as intermediaries, they cannot be fitted to either category, which seems to leave a massive elephant in the room of his very speculative ontology.
Did I say your statements "irked" me? I just can't see the point in making statements if you are not prepared to back them up, however cursorily.
I am already familiar with Schopenhauer's critiques of Kant's purportedly plural notion of noumena; I have very recently referred to that very issue myself either in this thread or in Mongrel's 'Nietzsche' thread (or perhaps both, I can't be bothered checking). This point shows Schopenhauer's misunderstanding of Kant's nuanced conception of noumena, of the 'things in themselves'. Kant sees them not as substantive things (only phenomena are substantive things) but as placeholders for the unknowable X that appears to us as individuated empirical things. Kant does not wish to reify the noumenal, that would be to fall into the tendency of the human mind that is conditioned by experience of and judgements about, the empirical. It is actually Schopenhauer who reifies the noumenal by identifying it with an idea adapted from Spinoza's notion of 'conatus',. So, I would say he actually reintroduces a kind of backwards looking objectivism with the idea of a deterministic striving as being the ontological ground of reality. So, I have long thought his critique of Kant on this point is rather naive, even simplistic.
Before I proceed, I want to distinguish mathematical from geometrical. I think that this is important, and the importance may become evident when we bring time in relation to space. So far we've discussed spatial geometry independently of time, in an abstract way. When you say "the shortest distance from a line to a point is the perpendicular", this is not a mathematical truth, but a geometrical truth. That this is true, is proven with measurement, and when we measure we apply mathematics. Geometrical principles are proven with mathematics.
The problem is that this process of proving, measuring, is an empirical process. One could state any random geometrical principles, and the truth, falsity, or certainty of them is only revealed through the empirical proof. Because of this, geometrical truths are not really a priori. They might be in principle a priori, but that the shortest distance from a line to a point is the perpendicular, rather than some other angle, is true, is a posteriori.
So let's take the basic principle, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. That there is a separation between two points assumes that there is something between them. This we call space. So even to demonstrate that there is separation between two points requires an empirical process, so all geometrical concepts are fundamentally a posteriori.
Quoting Agustino
I think that this is a mistaken principle then. These geometrical principles are a posteriori, and therefore they are not certain. This is due to the nature of the empirical proof, and it is well demonstrated by Einstein's relativity theory. The problem is that when we assume a separation between point A and point B, we assume space between them. To measure this separation, something such as a beam of light must traverse the space between point A and point B. This requires time. Due to this passing of time, the shortest distance between two points is no longer considered to be a straight line. That's the curvature of space-time. So even the most fundamental geometrical principle, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line is not certain. It has been proven uncertain by the empirical process which is required to demonstrate its truth.
Quoting Agustino
So I believe this is all backward. Euclidian geometry is not capable of perfectly representing spatial reality. It is deficient because it does not take into account the way that time is related to space. When we bring time and space into relationship, which is necessary in order to understand spatial reality, Euclidian geometry fails us. So instead of what you say, ("It's because the form that our mind imposes on experience (space) ensures that this is so"), the reality of space imposes itself onto the forms which our minds produce, forcing us to change what we may have previously considered to be a certainty.
And as I explained in the case of space, all three of these, space, time, and causation, are concepts which we are forced to produce in order to account for our experience. We produce a concept of space to account for our experience of separation
Quoting Agustino
Now, that we have separated geometry from mathematics, and I think that this was necessary because it is evident that all aspects of geometry are uncertain, and are evolving, we can ask whether there are aspects of mathematics which are certain, and cannot evolve. I believe that there is, and that this is to be found in a number of aspects. First, there is a necessary equality of units, and second there is a necessary order. Each of these may be an a priori certainty.
Quoting Agustino
Why would you say this? Surely there is a controlling factor, that is the passing of time. What do you have in mind as a "controlling factor"?
No that's not the point. The point is WHY he earns the right to property by work, which is the most significant point, otherwise it would be just a meagre assertion.
Quoting John
Sureeeeee... except that it tells exactly how the imagination functions and how it aids the genius to reach a truth that others cannot even see...
Quoting John
Yes, especially Hegel X-)
Quoting John
Nope. One substance ontology involving double aspect theory
Quoting John
Thing-in-itself
Platonic Idea (out of time)
Will (in time, but out of space and causality)
Representation
This is roughly the hirearchy, your account shows merely a shallow misreading of Schopenhauer.
It's merely sharing what I think. I don't have to back up everything I say, especially when it's totally unrelated to the topic and a quick reply about a side conversation
Quoting John
Things in themselves are incoherent. If space/time/causality are what individuates things, then there cannot be individual things apart from space, time and causality.
So, according to you, the thing in itself is not identified as Will by Schopenhauer? It's "one substance" involving quadruple aspect theory, then?
You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. Your failure to do it just makes it look like you cannot do it, though.
Quoting Agustino
You didn't read what I wrote about Kant's attitude to things in themselves, and simply quote a phrase out of context. So, you are repeating the same mistake as Schopenhauer by imputing a claim, that things in themselves exist, to Kant that he quite explicitly disavowed.
The Will is closer to thing-in-itself than Representation as it's only conditioned by one of the categories, time, and not the other ones. However, later Schopenhauer disavows and walks back on the identification of Will as Thing-in-itself and returns to the thing-in-itself being unknown - an unknown which is nevertheless non-dual.
And there is no quadruple aspect theory. Will is the ground of the phenomenon. Platonic Ideas are encounters with and glimpses of the thing-in-itself through art, or mystical experiences. The thing-in-itself is the unknown ground or source of the Platonic Ideas and of the Will. So it's still double aspect - Phenomenon composed hirearchically of Will and then the other Representations, and Thing-in-itself.
I think I do: Schopenhauer doesn't treat the thing-in-itself like an empirical state. He steps towards recognising as logical, rather than a thing we would grasp through observation. Sure he says it's "mysterious" like Kantians do, but it "mysterious" on it's own terms, rather than by a failure to appear empirically. It's to take out the common Kantian approach of "unknown" to the thing-in-itself. We might say that Schopenhauer says we know the-thing-itself, that it is a "mystery" we conceive and recognise (as opposed to Kant, who suggests "we know nothing" ).
Right, things-in-themselves don't exist then >:O How about you cite me some of Hegel's insights, as a shallow reader of Hegel I'd be more interested in that, than hearing about your shallow reading of Schopenhauer.
If you want to avoid discussing the relationship between Kant's and Schopenhauer's conception of noumena and phenomena, which is very pertinent to the OP, in my view, then bringing Hegel into the discussion is the perfect way. No one's forcing you to discuss anything
Yes.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
It seems to me that John is merely carrying out his personal vendetta though, with little interest to the underlying philosophy. As you can see, the statements that irk him is that I consider Schopenhauer more correct than Kant - as if my personal judgement on the relative correctness of Schopenhauer in comparison with Kant actually mattered in a discussion of Schopenhauer's transcendental idealism with reference to non-euclidean geometry :s
How is it pertinent to the OP? The OP is "can S's transcendental idealism survive the challenge posed to it by non-euclidean geometry?" And in fact, we're not one inch closer to answering this than we were before all this mumbo-jumbo. That means that our discussions have failed.
I disagree with this. There can be no situation where measurement would indicate that the perpendicular from a line to a point isn't the shortest distance from the line to the point. If you think there can be, please conceive of and give me such an example.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not if space is a form that the mind supplies a priori...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not necessarily, I could theoretically build a ruler long enough and measure it. And even if it did take sending a light beam, I fail to see how this disproves that the perpendicular is the shortest distance... Perhaps if you could explain this in more detail or give an illustration via youtube or somehow.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Right, so then you're a transcendental realist
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Where is this a priori certainty coming from?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The thing-in-itself is ultimately real, while the phenomenon is only real qua phenomenon and not as thing-in-itself.
I would say this context of discussion relies on dismissing Kant's understanding of noumena. To conceive S's transcendental idealism, one has to accept noumena is something we understand. Space, time and causality have to understood as logical-- things known without reference to empirical observation.
To even address the question you are asking, one has to accept Kant's account is mistaken. John isn't willing to do that, even in imagination.
Well it presupposes bracketing it, to say the least, as it's not what is under discussion.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yes, I agree, so this discussion isn't for him, he's free to open another to discuss the differences between Kant and Schopenhauer's conception of noumenon if that's what he's interested in. I selected Schopenhauer's transcendental idealism for this discussion because that's the only one I find philosophically interesting - he obviously doesn't.
Kant certainly does not treat the thing in itself "like an empirical state". Kant conceived it as a purely formal notion, not at all as something we could "grasp through observation". It was Kant who first clearly defined what can be grasped through observation as the empirical, so I have no idea what point you are attempting to make here. Also, for Kant the noumenal is mysterious precisely on its own terms; it is the 'in itself', after all. Of course, it is also true that it is mysterious for us; who else could it be mysterious for? So of course it is, as much for Kant as for Schopenhauer, 'a "mystery" we conceive and recognize".
This just isn't true. You don't recognise the thing-in-itself at all for Kant. It's just a big X with no understanding of it at all. No understanding even what that X is meant to be, or what it stands for... That's why many of the Kantians who came after, even today, are seriously seriously deluded... you have Kantians speaking of space in-itself >:O
I think it goes deeper than that. Kant more or less derives the a priori nature of space and time from empirical observations-- he more or less says space and time are necessary because he thinks they are needed to have empirical states. But I'm swinging widely off-topic now, so I'll leave it there.
This is so misconceived there seems to be little hope that addressing it will make any difference. Space and time are for Kant the 'pure forms of intuition' they are explicitly conceived by a priori synthetic reasoning (pure reason or logic) not via observation. Space and time are not observed, they are the conditions for any observation, they are thus a priori. They are synthetic though, insofar as they can only explicitly conceived subsequent to experience; they are in that sense reliant on experience.
That approach is the very one I'm talking about. For Kant, the thing-in-itself is a "mystery" because it doesn't have an empirical appearance. We don't have any idea about because it doesn't appear in the terms we can know something (the empirical).
Schopenhauer treats it differently. For him it not a "mystery" because it doesn't appear empirically. Rather the thing, the thing-in-itself, is mystery-- a logical object not defined by what we don't know (a presence beyond our empirical observation), but rather by what we do know, the logical object of thing-in-itself.
Well, I would say that first we must ascertain exactly what his transcendental idealism consists in before we can discover whether it is threatened by non-Euclidean geometry. To do that it will certainly be helpful to bring Kant in, since Schopenhauer's TI is an adaptation of Kant's. I would also say that if non-Euclidean geometry turns out to refute Schopenhauer's TI, then it will necessarily also refute Kant's.
That was outlined in the OP largely and in subsequent posts
Quoting John
That is not needed, as S's transcendental idealism can clearly be treated as independent of Kant's, given their ultimately strong disagreements.
Quoting John
No this doesn't follow, because Kant allows for space in-itself
Nonsense, for Kant the thing in itself is recognized as being logically necessary. He says that for there to be representation it follows logically that there must be something that is represented. It is thought by Kant as noumenal only in the sense that it utterly escapes, by its very definition, empirical investigation.
Kant does not ever refer to "space in itself" as far as I am aware or can remember. Can you cite a reference for this?
No he doesn't, but future Kantians do ;)
Any "vendetta" is a product of your own imagination.
That's hardly relevant; it is well known that there are still armies of Kant scholars arguing over how to interpret his ideas.
This is what I was referring to when I said Kant derives the a priori of space and time from empirical observation.
For Kant, the logically necessary is a means of explaining representations. For the computer in front of me to exist and be observed, for example, it needs a place in space and time, and the thing-in-itself to be represented, else I couldn't exist observing my computer. Under Kant, the a priori is drawn out of a perceived need to account for empirical observations.
For Schopenhauer, the a priori doesn't work in this way. Rather than an account explaining empirical observations, a priori truths (e.g. space, time, causality, the thing-in-itself) are their own logical objects.
Yes, but as Schopenhauer told you, it takes a genius to imagine from the very imperfect information one has, to what is actually the case X-)
If the thing in itself is the noumenal and Will is not it, but rather merely "close to it", then is Will phenomenal? Obviously it cannot be part of the noumenal according to Schopenhauer, because the noumenal cannot have parts (according to both Schopenhauer and Kant).
It must be part of the phenomenal if it is "conditioned" by "only one of the categories", or even one of the categories, because the categories, although they are themselves transcendental "condition" only the phenomenal, not the noumenal.
And what about the platonic ideas? are they noumenal? If they are then how can there be more than one idea. And if all four the noumenal (timeless) the ideas ( timeless) the Will ( temporal only) and the phenomenal ( temporal and spatial) are different form one another, then how are there not four ontological categories?
Unless you can give cogent answers to these questions you should be beginning to see why Schopenhauer's ontology is a hopeless mess that doesn't need to be refuted by any geometry; it refutes itself.
But you have not shown that any experience, as opposed to merely inferences from mathematical models and observations, does refute Euclidean geometry. We infer that space is curved; we do not experience it as curved.
Ultimately yes, hence why you experience it in time.
Quoting John
Yes, your brain is working well in logical deductions.
Quoting John
They are glimpses of the noumenon, they are obviously still individuated, hence why they are not thing-in-itself. The thing-in-itself qua thing-in-itself is not experienced as an empirical state. The Platonic ideas can be experienced, but not as phenomenon (the subject-object distinction breaks off during such experiences - they are merely the grades of the objectification of the thing-in-itself).
Quoting John
They are different in degree of objectification/individuation of the thing-in-itself. One substance
Quoting John
That was a quick job. I'm waiting for another one.
I already know you think you are a genius. If only you could demonstrate it. :-}
Yes you do experience its effects. And if space isn't curved, and space is an a priori form provided by the mind, where the hell are those curved effects coming from? Unless you can answer this question you can say bye bye to your Kantianism.
You haven't given any cogent account at all of how something completely timeless and undifferentiated can manifest itself in either individual spatio-temporal forms, or in timeless forms or in a temporal Will or in temporal wills. This is why I reject any form of monism as incoherent. The Christian idea of God as Trinity is far more coherent. In that conception God is both immanent and transcendent. This is also the basis of my criticism of Spinoza's philosophy, insofar as it wants to say that God is natura naturans but not natura naturata, because the latter is immanent and the former (as something like the laws of nature) is transcendental.
Hegel regurgitation!
I have given a means for how it does so. It does so via the forms of space, time and causality.
I'd go one further. Sometimes we do perceive it outright. We draw examples of it all the time. It's even possible someone could see it out in the world. All it would take in an aura of plane, lines, etc. in the right places of someone's visual experience-- much like seeing any other part of the world.
We experience effects, which we (perhaps incorrectly) infer to be due to curvature of space. All inferences are fallibilistic. We do not experience space as curved.
Yes we can. Have a look here ;) it's called a convex mirror
Right so if they're not due to the curvature of space, what the fuck are they due to?! :s
But where in an utterly undifferentiated timeless unity do those forms come from? This is the perennial Parmenidean problem with monistic conceptions of reality.
You're trying to ask what causes the thing-in-itself to be so and so - that's stupid, nothing causes it, because causality applies only for the objectification of the thing-in-itself (the empirical states) not for the thing-in-itself qua thing-in-itself.
How would I know? Perhaps God put them there to confuse us...or perhaps the science is simply wrong and will be corrected in the future, when we have more information (if the species can manage to survive that long).
The monism itself is the answer. In being timeless and undifferentiated,all of the many changes in the world have no impact on how it is expressed. If individual spatio-temporal forms affected it, it would be differentiated and no longer by timeless.
[quote=John]But where in an utterly undifferentiated timeless unity do those forms come from.[/quote]
It cannot come for anywhere. If it were, it would be a differentiated state coming out of another differentiated state. The timeless monism, Substance, the-thing-in-itself, does not come from anywhere. It always so, no matter change or time-- that's why it's timeless.
The old trope - there's no explanation but I'll go on believing it >:O
John has forgotten that the principle of causality which he presupposes in asking the question applies only to the phenomenon (empirical reality) not to the thing-in-itself.
Too late, I already voyeur'd what you originally wrote. It got me uncontrollably hard, too, goddamn it.
Now you are saying that we cannot know anything at all about the thing in itself, a position that you were earlier criticizing Kant for upholding. This is where faith steps in, and reason bows out. The conceptions we have of the thing in itself must all be inadequate, but some may seem more satisfying to reason than others.
Just the opposite-- he saying we can know the thing-in-itself. It just doesn't have an empirical form, so any attempt to describe in such terms fails (which Kant understands) and that any question asking for its empirical form is incoherent (which the Kantians do not understand).
I haven't anywhere stated that I think the thing in itself is or is not timeless. It might be both temporal and eternal (immanent and transcendent) which I think would be a more satisfying and explanatory view. Causality has nothing to do with the issue. Either the thing in itself gives rise to the world we experience or it is utterly disconnected from it; which would make it irrelevant to us. Or it doesn't exist at all, in which case we are left with phenomenalism.
Of course, in a sense if there is a thing in itself then we do know it in all our experience, since all our experience arises from it. That is uncontroversial. But we do not know the nature of it; we do not know what we know of it, in other words.
In case you hadn't noticed I'm ignoring any ad hominems directed at me and trying not to get drawn into exchanging personal insults. I'm really only interested in critiquing the ideas.
The point is asking "for the nature of it" (in the sense you mean) is incoherent becasue it is defined by not having one at all. It's a "mystery" in empirical terms because there is no empirical account that grasps it.
This is it's nature. We do know what we know. The thing-in-itself is a logical object without empirical form or account. The myth we do not understand this comes out of expecting it to have an empirical form. We mistaken think we need to define it empirically to understand what it is.
So what are we experiencing when we employ gravitational lensing to see distant planets circling distant stars? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_microlensing
When John mentioned this on p2, you dismissed this rather too glibly - talking about spacetime curvature in a way that was out-of-date since Gauss first defined the notion of intrinsic curvature.
Quoting Agustino
3D space doesn't require a fourth spatial dimension in which to curve. The Universe could be a hypersphere - a compact curved spherical 3D space - but it wouldn't mathematically need to float in a larger space like a planet in a void.
So if we are talking about actual modern physical concepts, then even watching a falling rock accelerating in a gravitational field counts as "seeing spacetime curvature". A frame of reference is only "flat" to the degree that energy potential differences have been globally constrained to make that the case.
The non-Euclidean argument really ought to be reversed.
The early assumption was that flatness was natural as the simplest state. And that did mathematically appear to accord with the world as experienced at a "classical scale" - a scale of a temperature and extent convivial to human existence. You could build things using Euclidean geometry and experience would seem to say that you could achieve a perfect carpentered fit. A picture really could be absolutely level to some idea of a horizontal plane.
But nowadays, the more natural presumption would be that flatness is the surprising answer to the ontic question of "how much is everything curved?". Naively, spatial extent could have any curvature value. What's stopping it not? And yet our Universe has this remarkably fine-tuned balance where there is this incredibly tiny deviation from perfect flatness - the hyperbolic curvature of a universal "dark energy" - that means there is in fact something rather than nothing.
A Universe that was actually flat couldn't even exist because it would be too unstable. It would shrivel up under its own weight with the slightest nudge of any local fluctuation.
I'm not sure what this says about TI - as the whole issue of synthetic a-prioris makes sense to me only as saying something about the fact that we find mathematical abstractions to be a way to grasp the symmetry principles reality must employ to organise itself.
So you can see why mathematical abstractions seem a special kind of deal - a way to transcend the epistemic and grasp the ontic. But also just as clearly, for humans the grasping of the relevant maths has been a work in progress.
We started by glimpsing the principles in the near at hand, classical scale of empirical experience. Euclid showed how flat spaces could be constructed from straight lines and stationary points. And from there we have reversed around to see existence from its other end - the view of spacetime (and energy even) as the product of top-down organising constraint.
Again, naively (in this more sophisticated ontic view) the Universe could have, so should have, every kind of spatiotemporal curvature. That means a theory of everything has to aim at discovering a mathematical-strength reason it is instead the case that the Universe is - almost - absolutely flat and classical over at least 140 orders of magnitude of empirically-observable scale.
Then how does it differ from the 'unknowable X' that Kant postulated? Kant did not deny we know this is our situation with regard to our thoughts about the limits of knowledge and reason; that this where we find ourselves placed logically, so to speak, in relation to what we conceive as the 'in itself'.
We know it. It is conceivable. Rather than an absence of knowledge (i.e. a thing we don't know, as we don't have access to its empirical forms), it is a presence of knowledge (i.e. the timeless understood or conceived). In this understanding, we fully grasp the thing-in-itself. Rather than an "unknowable X," it is a knowable X.
I am not a physicist, but I understand that this is the case with 4d space-time. Space-time is curved according to the principles of general relativity. Do you know what a geodesic is? You can research this on Wikipedia and other sources. Euclidian geometry assumes a static space, as if there is a static "present time" at which measurements can be made. But once we account for the fact that nothing is static, everything is moving in time, so that the present time is indefinite, our concept of space must be adjusted to allow for this. That is why a straight line cannot be consider to be the shortest distance between two points. Physicists now take into account that time is passing when they make such measurements. The entirety of Euclidean geometry can be dismissed because it assumes a static space without the influence of passing time. The concept of space which Euclidian geometry presupposes, has been demonstrated to be inaccurate. Therefore Euclidian geometry itself is inaccurate.
Quoting Agustino
I think the same general objection applies to Kant as it does to Schopenhauer's metaphysics.
But one question is, does non-Euclidean geometry invalidate Euclid's fifth postulate, or does it simply show that it's applicability is limited, in a way analoguous to how Newton's laws of motion were shown to have limited scope with the advent of relativity?
Likewise, from what I am reading about the issue, opinion is divided as to whether non-Euclidean geometry actually invalidates 'transcendental idealism':
Wes Alwan Partially-Examined Life
What you're failing to grasp is that I don't disagree that we know how we think the in itself (and that we know it in this way is all that what you are saying really amounts to). The point is , though, that the in itself is thought as that which logically must 'be there' (even the terms 'be' or 'be there' are not really appropriate here, and in fact nor is any of our language), but of which we can know nothing in any of the kinds of senses that we know the empirical. All we know of it is given in apophatic terms as the negation of the ways in which empirical things are conceived. Non-spatial, non-temporal, non-causal and so on.
Sigh... the point is that's mistaken. The thing-in-itself is not merely an absence of emprical form, but rather its own thing, understood and concieved itself. Rather than merely a negation of empirical forms, the thing-in-itself is something in its own right.
Spacial, causal, temporal, etc. are NOT emprical forms. When we speak about them, we aren't describing the emprical. They are logical expressions.
This means that not only can we not know the thing-in-itself emprically, but also that the emprical is irrelevant to knowledge of the thing-in-itself. We don't lack any knowledge of the thing-in-itself because we can't give it in empirical terms.
I think it is I who should be sighing! You really haven't said anything here. Except for your disagreements with what you think I or Kant have claimed there is literally no content here. And the disagreements themselves are mistaken. Please quote where I said that space, time and causality are "empirical forms".
If you think we know something, anything, positive about the in itself that is given in terms completely independent of any negative reference to the empirical then tell us what that item of knowledge is.
If you think we can't know anything about the in itself, but you want to say that we don't lack any knowledge of the in itself on account of the fact that we can't couch such knowledge in empirical terms, then on account of what do you say we lack any such knowledge?
I really doubt you will try to honestly, and in a spirit of good will, address the questions I'm asking here, but if you don't, I won't respond to you again, unless I see some genuine attempt to address others on common terms in your future posts. Your style of 'engaging' really is abysmal, Willow, seriously.
Only if you replace Schopenhauer's conception of the thing-in-itself for Kant's (in other words, only if there is no possibility for a space in-itself)
Quoting Wayfarer
Non-Euclidean geometry includes Euclidean as merely a subset of it, when the curvature of space is 0.
Quoting Wayfarer
The opinion is divided over Kant's transcendental idealism, because some people postulate a space in-itself, just like the partially examined life you yourself link to.
This must be just false, since it assumes that our space is not curved - if space itself is curved, then you'd actually see it as a straight line.
Yes indeed. How is it possible for there to be a conflict? Because there is a space-in-itself whose effects we notice, despite our inability to perceive this space-in-itself. This is a materialist re-appropriation of Kant, which is very common in today's world, but Kant (and Schopenhauer) would never ever agree to such interpretations. For them, space is intuited - any geometry always involve some a priori perception. You cannot even have a geometry formed of principles which are not synthetic - any conception of space must make a reference to perception (Sensation), and not just Understanding (concepts). So the only thing that can save Kant is noumenal space. If you admit noumenal space, you're a materialist, end of story. So Kant's project as he conceived it, is all but dead.
Let's suppose there is a "space-in-itself". Isn't this contradictory to Schopenhauer? Space cannot be a pure intuition, nor an idea. And this validates what I have said, none of our spatial principles, Euclidian or otherwise, can be certain. They are all susceptible to doubt.
Yes it is >:O (which is the point I've been making all along) Now let me address your other post
This is irrelevant though. A geodesic appears as a straight line to observation - in fact, it actually is a straight line in a curved space. Non-Euclidean geometry includes Euclidean geometry - Euclidean geometry occurs when space simply has 0 curvature. But that the perpendicular is the shortest distance between a point and a line holds true in either Euclidean or Non-Euclidean space. In Non-Euclidean space, the perpendicular straight line (or geodesic) is still the shortest distance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic#/media/File:Spherical_triangle.svg
You see straight line AC (actually a curve from our point of view, but a straight line from the point of view of being embedded in the curved space)
From point B to AC, the shortest distance is still the perpendicular little a (also a curve from a point of view external to that space, but from the point of view internal to it, it is a straight line)
No it doesn't give rise to the world in a causal (empirical) sense.
This is correct.
To say that it "appears as a straight line", indicates that you recognize this as an illusion, which is not the true reality of the situation. The straight line is one dimensional. The perpendicular employs a second dimension. So it is just an extremely simplistic way of looking at the space around us. The fact that we can establish compatibility between the simplistic way of seeing things, and the more complicated (but more accurate) way of seeing things, does not indicate that the simplistic way is true. It is just the case that in order to convert one's mind from seeing things in the simplistic way, to seeing things in the more accurate, but complicated way, compatibility must be established. This is evident when we went from a geocentric to a heliocentric way of looking at the solar system. Despite the fact that the movements of all the planets, sun and moon, could be predicted from the geocentric model, and these movements had to be made consistent with the heliocentric model, it would be wrong to argue that the geocentric model is still a true way of seeing things.
Quoting Agustino
So all that is being done here, is that the more complicated, and more accurate conception, "curved space", is being made to be consistent with "a straight line" that you may see. But you only actually see a straight line on a 2d surface, or a 1d string line. And this does not account for the space which exists between 2d surfaces, or all around the string line. It's an extremely simplistic, artificial and manufactured way of "seeing" things. Even the 3d representation does not account for the fact that time is passing, so it is still way too simplistic, artificial and manufactured. It is not a true representation of "space-in-itself" because it is too simplistic. Space-in-itself does not exist independently of time passing, so any representation which cannot account for time passing is inaccurate.
No it's really no illusion at all. If you are a two dimensional creature living your live on a two dimensional piece of paper which is curved to form a cylinder, when you're walking around the cylinder on a curved line, you yourself necessarily perceive it to be a straight line, and cannot perceive it as curved. The only way you can infer the curvature of your space, is if you find a way to alter it. We have found a way to alter it in our case - when the sun is between the earth and certain stars, it alters the curvature of the space between earth and those stars, and hence alters our measurement of their position, which we compare to when the sun isn't between the earth and those stars. If you cannot alter the curvature of your space, you cannot even know that it exists, except obviously by other signs such as you walk in a straight line and return to where you started from.
Show me a two dimensional creature living on a two dimensional surface. That's fictitious. Why do you need to refer to a fictitious scenario to demonstrate your claim unless your claim is itself fictitious?
Quoting Agustino
You are proceeding in the exact opposite way of reality, away from reality instead of toward reality. You base your unreal claim that two dimensional geometry is true by referring to a fictitious scenario. Then, you claim that you can only understand the true nature of space by altering it. But that's only because you are starting from your fictitious 2d assumptions, then claiming that the only way to make the reality of space compatible with you fictitious assumptions is to alter it. You fail to realize that the proper procedure is to alter your fictitious assumptions, because you cannot alter the reality of space.
You are the one using a fiction. You rely on seeing those lines being curved in a Euclidean analogy to non-Euclidean geometry to say that they are curved in non-Euclidean geometry which is patently false.
The straightness of a line is governed by its intrinsic curvature. Non-Euclidean curvature is an extrinsic curvature - space itself is curving. This has nothing to do with the straightness of the line - with its intrinsic curvature.
Quoting Agustino
OK, we both seem to be saying the same thing, the straight line is really curved. It has an "intrinsic curvature", so its straightness is just an illusion. If you want to say that its straightness is real, and the intrinsic curvature is an illusion, that's fine by me. But remember, you are the one who said "experience occurs on a stage which is ideal and not real". As far as I can tell, the straightness is ideal and not real.
In any case, the reason I wanted to separate geometry from mathematics is that I think all geometrical principles are dependent on empirical evidence, and therefore uncertain. I think this discussion only serves as proof of that point. I would prefer to move on to the principles of mathematics, in an attempt to determine whether there are any purely a priori principles.
... No we're definitely not saying the same thing.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/IntrinsicCurvature.html
As I have said a million times, Non-Euclidean geometry does not refute the axiom that the shortest distance is the perpendicular - among many other axioms that aren't refuted. So you have to explain to me where does this axiom get its certainty from, because it seems that regardless how our space is, it can't be refuted.
Agustino wonders what space is if not its properties, Euclidean or otherwise. There are several ways to answer this question. First, I think we can say that space is the principle of individuation, i.e. it is that part of my cognition that makes what I perceive a plurality of distinct objects. However, because space is inseparable from our cognition generally, the question is technically based on a category mistake, because it's asking for knowledge of that which conditions all knowledge. Space can no more be known in itself than the eye can see itself or digestion can digest itself. It can still be known and perceived, but not in the way that the question assumes. Lastly, geometry tries to determine the properties of points, lines, surfaces, and so on, so it's technically not correct to say that it determines the properties of space itself, since points, lines, and surfaces are themselves in space. Any attempt to know what space is through experience, that is, a posteriori, necessarily presupposes it.
Quoting Agustino
No. He's an ontological voluntarist, in that the being of the world is will, as opposed to mind, a la Berkeley.
Quoting Agustino
The stage, assuming by that you mean the mental picture appearing before a conscious subject, is both empirically real and transcendentally ideal. Our experience of objects is not false.
I think we see two bifurcations in Schopenhauer. There is first will and presentation, which is the world (hence his title). Then there is the world and the thing-in-itself.
Sure, except it doesn't address anything I've said although it purports to do so. I find that frustrating to have someone continually disagreeing with me on account of continually misunderstanding what I am saying.
OK, that's obviously true, but I haven't said it does, so I don't see the point of your post
That's right, and for Schopenhauer the world seems to be Will and Representation, and then over and above the world there seem to be the Platonic Ideas and the in itself. That's what I was trying to explain to Agustino.
This is correct.
Quoting John
The will can be considered a weird sort of phenomenon, yes. But it is not composed of parts, given that it's not in space. It is what appears in appearance or what is presented in presentation, which makes it the thing-in-itself for us. But it is not the thing-in-itself in and by itself.
Quoting John
The Ideas are outside of space, time, and causality, but they still presuppose the subject/object relation and so are still phenomenal. I would break up Schopenhauer's ontology in the following way:
- The thing-in-itself, which is completely unknowable.
- The will as the thing-in-itself when the latter becomes conscious of itself, which is knowable in time as distinct acts of will identical to the movements of the body.
- The Platonic Ideas as the different grades of the will's objectifying itself, that is, the different degrees of what the will wills, which is life/existence, and knowable in aesthetic contemplation when willing has temporarily abated, wherein one is conscious solely of the Idea and not the movements of one's body or of individual objects in space and time.
- Individual objects as the Platonic Ideas come under and known in space, time, and causal relation to each other.
The last three are all technically phenomenal, but in very different ways.
I would say part of the principle of individuation because time for example also individuates.
Quoting Thorongil
This is problematic. Space being inseparable from our cognition means that our knowledge is spatially mediated. Knowledge must have both perceptual and conceptual content according to Kant/Schopenhauer, because remember all knowledge must be ultimately reducible to some perception. If space is inseparable from our cognition, and non-Euclideanness is not perceivable in perception a priori, that means that non-Euclidean geometry cannot be knowledge, since it has no perceptual referent. That is obviously absurd.
Quoting Thorongil
Yes but I meant it in a different way. I meant it in the sense that the Will isn't material. In that sense it is a form of ontological idealism - the Will is closer to an idea or a subject than to matter.
Quoting Thorongil
I don't mean that by stage. I mean space, time and causality by stage.
I agree with (1) and (4), but (2) and (3) should be reversed. First, the will is given under time - we know of the will in time. The Platonic Ideas are known outside of space, time and causality, and hence must be higher than the will in the hirearchy. I might disagree that Platonic Ideas still presuppose subject/object, rather I'd say that in the case of experiencing the Platonic Ideas the subject and the object become one - thus there is a quieting of the will, temporarily - one knows a Platonic Idea by being it. But the Platonic Idea is a relic of the thing-in-itself so to speak - only a glimpse. So it is still individuated.
I'm confused about exactly what you want to argue. But it seems reasonable to derive the least action principle from empirical experience of the world. If a geometry appears to offer many paths, it is rational to suggest one will involve the least effort of all the alternatives. So once energy is included in our picture of physical reality, non-Euclidean geometry should pop out.
If we fire off two objects into empty space on parallel tracks, we can then observe whether they diverge, converge, or stay the same distance apart. The behaviour can then be interpreted either in terms of interactive forces or geometric curvature. And both would be complementary views of a world understood to be organised in terms of the deeper synthetic a priori of the least action principle?
So if the question is does non-Euclidean geometry change anything about our ability to grasp the essence of existence through a leap to rational generality, then it seems not. We just needed to drill down another level beyond Newtonian physics to a view where space, time and energy are combined in the form of the idea of a path in which the least energy gets expended (or equivalently, a space that is globally expanding or shrinking at a non-accelerating rate).
Sure.
Quoting Agustino
This is still a bizarre claim to me. It's equally distant from both ideas and matter in terms of what it is.
Quoting Agustino
No! This is profoundly antithetical to transcendental idealism. Rationalists thought we had knowledge of things not derived from experience, or a priori knowledge. Empiricists thought all knowledge was grounded in experience, or a posteriori knowledge. Transcendental idealism says that we do have knowledge a priori, but that this is limited to the forms of knowledge itself. In other words, we have immediate knowledge of the conditions of knowledge, while all other knowledge is mediated by those very conditions, and so is a posteriori.
Quoting Agustino
It's interesting to note here the semantic shift from "non-Euclidean space," a phrase you have used up until now, to "non-Euclideanness." Just what is "non-Euclideanness?" The properties of certain points, lines, etc derived from non-Euclidean geometry? I don't see anything else it could be, but if so, then, as I said, the points, lines, etc are themselves in space. It's one thing to say, "lines and shapes can be measured a certain way, a way different from what Euclid taught in some cases," which is what non-Euclidean geometry says, and quite another to say, "this describes space itself." Simply put, geometry, whatever model one uses, measures the properties of things, but space is not a thing, therefore it says nothing about what space is in itself. If it were an object, then it would be perceived as such. But we don't perceive it as such. We rather perceive objects that are already in space.
Quoting Agustino
Well, what I said is what I believe Schopenhauer means by that term. The stage is the unity of what I am presently conscious of.
Why then are geometrical judgements synthetic a prioris? They are synthetic because they are reducible to a perception a priori. And they are a priori because one doesn't need experience to have such a perception. Such a perception is achievable a priori.
Quoting Thorongil
But the relationships between geometric figures is what space itself is. I mean I ask you again, what else could space be? You say a form of our cognitive faculties... well, to be more exact, what is that?
Quoting Thorongil
I don't actually remember Schopenhauer using the term stage, but it may be possible. It's been awhile since I read WWR in full.
No, not according to Schopenhauer. The Platonic Ideas are dependent on the will, as the adequate objectification thereof.
That being said, as I have told you before, I myself sometimes think Schopenhauer ought to have reversed this order. But I was only trying to explain what Schopenhauer says on this point, instead of criticizing him.
Quoting Agustino
You can disagree if you like, but again, Schopenhauer still explicitly says they do.
So, to return to an earlier question I asked you: are the Platonic Ideas noumenal or phenomenal? It seems odd to say they are noumenal if they are multiple. If they are not multiple then there would only be the Platonic Idea. But even then the noumenal would consist in two aspects, which again seems wrong. This is just why I have been saying that I don't think Schopenhauer's ontology is well thought out. On the other hand something like this seems that it might work if we allow a triune noumenon (God) Who is both immanent and transcendent and drop the notion of absolute monism. We should also drop the idea of the noumenal as blind (Schopenhauer) or deterministic or necessitous (Spinoza).
Thorongil raises a good point that we don't directly perceive space and so we do not directly perceive it as either curved or flat. But apokrisis also makes the good point that at the scale of our perception, given our ability to build structures that consist of parallel members that can be shown not to converge, that we naturally conceive space as flat. If you accept, though, that gravitational warping of space points to a real phenomenon which is independent of our perceptions, then you are inevitably moving towards transcendental realism. Personally, I am more in favor of transcendental realism (only when it comes to the phenomenal, however the phenomenal in this context is not conceived as being exhausted by our perceptual experience). So, I think there is both a transcendental aspect of the phenomenal, and beyond that a transcendental noumenal. Of the latter I don't believe it could be appropriate to refer to it as either ideal (in the sense of being a function of our minds) or real (in any empirical sense as a phenomenal existent).
We can approach the latter with intellectual or mystic intution, but any attempt to reduce it to a monistic substance objectifies it. The triune conception is not completely intelligible to us, which is as it should be; it is the best we can do with out limited intellectual capacities. That's my take anyway.
Personally I would disagree, and I would say they're dependent on the thing-in-itself. Their objectification as representation - that is dependent on the will, since they are objectified further down into the representation through the means of the will
Yes, that is true. But I think the version I outline is stronger and more internally coherent than the one outlined by Schopenhauer, hence why I dared :P
........ :-}
Quoting John
Okay, I have no problem with that position in-so-far as this thread is concerned. I told you that moving towards transcendental realism is the only way to save Kant. But it won't work for Schopenhauer.
Quoting John
Schopenhauer's system is indeed a bit muddy, but these are hardly serious difficulties that are unresolvable based on Schopenhauer's own system. The Platonic Ideas are glimpses - partial glimpses - of the noumenon - hence why they are still individuated, or they appear individuated (this is my interpretation to make this clear). The noumenal doesn't consist in two aspects at all, except that we never encounter it as it is in-itself, we just encounter glimpses of it.
This is all pretty compatible with my triune metaphysics which would call the noumenal a vagueness - a naked unformed potentiality. The noumenal would thus have no character apart from that which develops via phenomenology - that is, shaped up into intelligible divisions by a (perceiving and willing) mind.
So beneath the jargon, there looks to be a lot of compatibility. All metaphysics of any interest tends towards a triadic or hierarchically organised view - the only kind of metaphysics that can do justice to the three things of observers, observables, and their shared developmental or causal history.
I find the world qua Spirit to be quite insipid personally.
Are you asking me this? Because if you are, I think I quite clearly implied above (and in my PMs) that I am not necessarily committed to defending this claim. I am only trying to defend the a priori nature of space itself, not the alleged a priori nature of geometrical judgments.
Quoting Agustino
Saying this doesn't make it so.
Quoting Agustino
I thought I answered this in a whole paragraph above. I don't know what more you want.
Quoting Agustino
I seem to recall him using it.
For Schopenhauer, they are phenomenal.
I did see this paragraph but I don't see how it answers the point. By means of what is space the principle of individuation if not by the relationships it creates amongst geometric figures?
No lines aren't themselves in space - rather they emerge from the properties of space itself. It is the properties of space that make lines possible to begin with. These properties are what geometry studies.
Any transcendental realism in Kant can really only a be a kind of transcendental empirical realism, though; and that is what I have been trying to get you to see. The noumenal is still, for Kant, unknowable. The move to realism may well not work for Schopenhauer's system but I think that only goes to show that he has not corrected, extended, or improved upon Kant at all, but rather muddled him up.
What do mean by "world as spirit"; who promotes that idea?
The noumenal just becomes unnecessary if the categories aren't ideal. Experience is no longer representation.
Quoting John
It doesn't work for Kant either, just for corrections of Kant. Kant certainly didn't allow for it. Space is ideal for Kant through and through. Non-Euclideanism disproves unaltered Kant as well.
I mean this nonsense:
Quoting John
Does Schopenhauer think space. time and causality are, exhaustively, functions of the human mind, such that they can have no existence or properties beyond, or contradictory to, how we directly experience and intuitively conceive them?
Kant thinks exactly this as well, are you kidding me? This is quotes from Kant in the OP
Quoting Agustino
But that passage says nothing at all about the world. :s
You asked me what I meant by that expression. I didn't mean something very technical by "world" in that context, so my apologies for not being more clear.
It doesn't create whatever relationships you might be referring to. It creates your ability to say "figures," plural.
Quoting Agustino
Rubbish. Try thinking of or drawing a line that is not located in space. It's impossible.
Quoting Agustino
This is sheer incoherence. I have no idea what you're talking about here.
Yeah, I think so.
Which is a property of space governed by geometry... the fact that two objects can't be in the same place at once is a statement of geometry. This is what individuates as you say... Why do you think Kant and Schopenhauer thought that geometry is synthetic a priori? Because geometry is the study of space qua space. Spatial relations and what they entail - that's what geometry studies. It's those relationships which individuate things.
Quoting Thorongil
You perceive lines in space, but they are possible only because of the properties of space itself.
Kant said this - does everyone see it? Space - if it is to be a form of our intuition, must condition and determine all possible spatial relationships that can exist within it.
No it isn't. Space has no properties. Only material objects in space have properties and these properties are what geometry studies.
Geometry does not study material objects... A line is not a material object at all. Neither is a triangle for that matter. Remember that a line has no thickness for example. Show me a line in the world that has no thickness....
Yes it does, because lines not being material objects don't show up in your experience a posteriori at all. They are possible solely because of the nature of space that is given in your intuition. Thus geometry studies space as given in the intuition. Lines apply to material objects only as limiting conditions - they determine the spatial relations possible among material objects. But lines, by virtue of having no thickness for example, are constructs of your spatial intuition - they literarily are nothing except a spatial relation.
Firstly, what exactly do you mean by "if the categories are not ideal"?
Quoting Agustino
Quoting Agustino
Kant is a very subtle thinker, and there is no general consensus among scholars as to exactly what his stance on the kind of transcendental empirical realism I have been recommending would be. There are scholars who actually interpret Kant as a transcendental realist despite Kant's own self-identification as a Transcendental Idealist. I mean, the empirical must contain, independently of our actual experience properties of its own which we may later discover, or maybe never discover, right? So space could be real in this kind of sense that its properties are not exhausted by what is intuitive self-evident to the human mind.
And that is what I meant by asking whether it is, exhaustively, a function of the human mind; the human mind considered here in terms of what is intuitively obvious to us. It's hard to see how Kant could deny that the empirical world consists in countless things of which the human mind, in terms of the totally of human experience up till now, has not been, is not, or will not ever be aware. I think that Kant's meaning in saying that space is a function of the human mind, is to say that it is a function of the transcendental ego, the totality of which we cannot be intuitively aware. So, what conditions human experience might be thought as ideal, and yet still independent of any and all human experience and intuition.
Seems like Kant has become quite relevant to this thread, after all.
8-)
No problem.
:)
The categories are provided by the mind, by the understanding, they are pure concepts and therefore they are ideal... In addition to these I include space and time which are also ideal and are forms of cognition provided by the mind.
Quoting John
The empirical is NOT space, but what is found within space. Kant makes this very clear in the paragraphs I have quoted to you - there is no doubt that for him space is transcendentally ideal fully and completely. He makes it very clear - he says space is not empirical.
Quoting John
This is not Kant's meaning at all. If it was, Kant would not have thought that the propositions of geometry are synthetic a prioris and hence certain. It seems to me that your love for Kant is getting in the way of your quest for truth. Kant makes it very clear that space is not empirical. That space is not empirical means that there cannot be empirical truths about the nature of space, that much is certain.
Quoting John
Not according to Kant.
You misunderstand - those geometric objects aren't objects at all - they are pure spatial relations. Geometry is the study of possible spatial relations.
This is the predominant Christian idea of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three-in-one. I'm puzzled that you would say it is nonsense, since I have been under the impression that you considered yourself to be a Christian.
:s
If space has no properties, then how come lines are possible in it? How come circles are possible? How come any geometric figure is possible in it? What governs what is possible in space if not its properties? What governs what space is, if not its properties?
And what, pray tell, is a "pure spatial relation?" For what it's worth, Wikipedia disagrees with you.
I do but I'm not big on the Trinity at all. I still consider One God to be more significant than the Trinity - the Trinity is a secondary development if you want out of that. Like one substance with multiple attributes.
They are possibilities which are determined to exist by the nature of space itself - by the properties of space. If space is 1 dimensional, there can be no relationships which we identify as triangles. That space simply doesn't allow them. So space determines, by its properties, what relationships are possible in it (hence what geometrical figures are possible, and what their properties must be).
I think that passage has the genesis for "saving" Schopenhauer's approach in a way, though it may more of a clarification of term that sort of breaks from the original intent. What exactly is space? Or time? Or casualty? Not any particular state we have observed. Each is "a priori," a truth no matter what the world might be doing at any moment. I think our investigation much begin here.
You stared with the challenge that an empirical space, time and causality poses to a priori nature claimed by Schopenhauer. My question is: does this challenge even make sense? Is Schopenhauer actually talking about seeing the curvature of space-time or the states which make-up the world?
No doubt this empirical space, time and causality is true, but that means nothing if Schopenhauer is talking about something else entirely. I think a priori space, time and causality are different things to the empirical forms we encounter. Unlike what we observe, a priori space, time and causality do not say anything about the world. They are entirely in the logical realm by their definition. Not a state of the world at all, but rather a particular logical expression of the world: the logic of empirical states belonging to space,time and causality.
Seems to me the ideality of space, time and causality only becomes an issue if it confused with empirical space, time and causality,
Again this is an interpretive subtlety I would say. Space is not an empirical object, but the empirical is spatial. If there are parts of the empirical that currently lie beyond human experience, which I think Kant would certainly have agreed with, then they must be spatial right? It is in that sense that spatiality is not dependent on any or all individual human perceptions or intuitions. IT is not dependent on the mind in this sense. It is the presence of ambiguities like this in Kant , that are due to the enormous conceptual difficulties of the subject matter, that have allowed for the controversies in Kant scholarship about what it is that he actually meant; 'was he actually a kind of transcendental realist?' and so on.
So Christ was not actually God Incarnate, but just a man, according to you?
No, since space is a form of knowledge - that which makes knowledge and experience possible - there cannot be any spatial knowledge to be gained by experience (hence why geometry is necessarily synthetic a priori and never synthetic a posteriori - Kant was very clear about this). If knowledge of space is gained by experience then that which was supposed to make experience possible in the first place was not known by the very mind which structured experience according to it - that's a contradiction.
Quoting John
I think if we are loyal to Kant things are much more clear. If we try to see how good that Kantian approach is or can be, that is an entirely different question, and then you can take your interpretations, however unlikely and impossible they actually are for Kant himself, and use them. Indeed that's what pretty much all people who still call themselves Kantian have done.
I personally believe that Jesus is God in Spirit, and Man in flesh. But I wouldn't personally be very aghast at a Tolstoy re-reading of the Gospel as he does it in Gospel in Brief if you know it, where Jesus is just a man, given birth by a woman with an unknown father in the flesh. As I have said however, I believe Jesus is God in Spirit and Man in flesh but fuck if I know what that is supposed to actually mean. I'm a theist ignostic on this point.
>:O >:O >:O
Why do you think so? Have you read Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief? It was one of Wittgenstein's favorite books
Quoting Heister Eggcart
Why are you laughing it's true mate! >:O I'm just being honest
You sound like John trying to talk about the thing-in-itself. A priori space is... a priori space: the logical expression of space itself. It doesn't tell us anything about the world and it's not meant to. All it deals is the logic of space.
In the case of Euclidean space, one has the logic of Euclidean space. The question of what's possible in the space doesn't make sense. Logic of Euclidean space doesn't apply outside itself and it doesn't need to. Many other things are possible of course, different logics which are true and may be used, but that doesn't affect Euclidean logic. It just means sometimes we need a different logic to talk about what we want to.
Okay but now you've evacuated the whole Kantian concept of a priori space of its meaning as it was given by Kant and Schopenhauer. Space being ideal for them guaranteed the truths of geometry - it made them synthetic a prioris. They applied to any and all experiences simply because the mind structured all experiences within Euclidean space. And it didn't guarantee the truths within the reference frame of Euclidean geometry only, it guaranteed them it terms of their applicability to the empirical world, precisely because the empirical world is structured to be, by the mind, in Euclidean space.
I'm not sure what you're asking here. Your last question seems to commit the category mistake I listed above. Nothing can "govern" space.
Quoting Agustino
A possibility is a thing that may happen or be the case, so you're saying that a line is a thing, which is what I said. It is an object, albeit a mental object.
Quoting Agustino
No. Non/Euclidean geometry's axioms determine such things. Not space.
I haven't read that Tolstoy work. If you believe Christ was "God in spirit, Man in flesh" in a sense that other humans are not, then i can't see how that would not be to believe in the trinity. You say you don't know what your belief means, but what is the problem with that? People believe in the Trinity, or less ambitiously, the noumenal, or monistic substance or mind-independent physical reality or whatever; and I'm quite sure they don't really know what those really mean either.
What allows those axioms to be possible if not space?
Quoting Thorongil
Why does space allow triangles to exist? Why isn't the nature of space such that triangles are impossible?
Quoting Thorongil
Or a relationship.
Quoting Thorongil
And what determines the possibility of non-euclidean axioms (and Kant and Schopenhauer have both critiqued the notion of axiom actually) if not the nature of space itself? When we postulate axioms, don't we actually refer to a specific kind of space?
For sure, but that alludes to the deeper problem with their approach. "Cannot perceive" is an incoherence. Perception is always an actual state, the presence of an experience of something.
To try to say one cannot perceive it to think that one's idea of the world must necessarily happened, that somehow the thing is question is predetermined never to be perceived. It is to ignore the necessity of possibility.
I think they should stop believing in them then. I believe it simply based on the authority of the Scripture, and recognise that I can't understand it.
>:O meaning?
But only as conceived in terms of relata like points and lines. Or at a deeper level - one that includes the reality of material being. - in terms of least actions and the global symmetries they break.
So geometry certainly started out as a maths of space (thus excluding time/energy). But that turned out to be an incomplete view of spatiotemporal reality.
I think Kant scholars would all agree on one thing; that Kant was not very clear about anything. I think you're still not getting the point that the mind that intuitively conceives space, time and causality is not exhaustively) the same mind that structure experience. I mean we are not intuitively aware of the minds activity of structuring experience are we? So how can we presuppose that we can know all things about how space structure empirical experience?
When it comes to time, which also is considered synthetic a priori there is not even any consensus about its intuited nature. Does it flow, or does it stand still and objects and events move within it, and so on, Such things are not to be empirically discovered, but only intuitively considered and yet we do not fully understand time; so the nature of time is not immediately self-evident to the mind from which it purportedly originates. This problem may be resolved if one thinks that time, space and causality originate in a Greater Mind and that their characteristics are only partially obvious to us.
Your fascination with Tolstoy is...(N)
Quoting Agustino
I'm laughing because, if I don't understand something, I do not believe it to be true.
That's why I say my argument goes against their intention. The ideal can be saved, but only by turning into its own thing, where is is no longer a ground or defined by correlation. In doing so, their understanding of the logic of the empirical is lost. The world may do more and may express different logics than they thought. Sometimes Euclidean geometry is not expressed by the world (as you noted in challenges).
It's the relationship of logic to the empirical that Kant gets wrong. Euclidean geometry is a synthetic a priori (and so is the logic of space). It's just that the world doesn't always express those rules (despite the rules of Euclidean geometry always being true) and the logic of space is an expression rather than a ground.
The logical conclusion of that is that you should believe in nothing that is not either empirically given or given by scriptural authority. In which case, forget all (or at least most) of philosophy.
Yes, as I said, back to Berkeley you go
Quoting John
Because space is an a priori form of our KNOWLEDGE. We know through space, hence space conditions our knowledge.
But for example I believe in one substance because all other conceptions are incoherent. So it's not only empirical truths that I believe or those given by scriptural authority. I also believe in rational truths.
Well you can be mistaken in both believing or not believing but you have to choose one.
To be coherent, the latter must be reversed. Space is a condition of our knowledge. Our instance of knowledge is inseparable from the logic of space. Rather than a ground which acts causally (i.e. without space, you could not be caused to exist), space is an expression of this instance of knowledge (as a state, you express space). Without our knowledge, this expression of space (our knowledge expressing space) would not be.
This means knowledge has a wider context than just space. Space may be expressed by it, but that logic is no needed for any instance of knowledge. Logically, we may know of things beyond or without space.
What do you mean? Belief in itself is a truth claim isn't it? To believe something is to think it true.
There is a sense in which triangles are indeed impossible, for we don't perceive perfect triangles in nature, while the triangles we can imagine are based on the imperfect shapes that we perceive. So space only determines that things are numerically distinct, not what they are. What determines what they are, i.e. what their essence is? The will. What determines what the will is? Nothing, for the will is groundless. So your question is nonsensical.
There's a quote from Nikola Tesla I like and feel like quoting here, as he says much the same thing I do:
-
Quoting Agustino
Your answer has been "experience," which I need not dispute to maintain my position. A model of experience is not the experience itself.
Quoting Agustino
That people ought to take your declarations of being an orthodox Christian with a grain of salt.
I never said that one refutes the other, remember, I said we establish compatibility between the two. The heliocentric model of the solar system does not refute the claim that the sun rises in the morning. It just allows us to see this in a different way.
As I said before, your axiom gets its certainty from empirical verification, measurement. Without measurement you could state any random axiom such as "the shortest distance from a line to a point is at an 80 degree angle to the line". How is your axiom of the perpendicular more certain than this axiom of the 80 degree angle, without measurement? The only reason why your axiom cannot be refuted is because it can be demonstrated empirically, measurement. Therefore it does derive its certainty from "how our space is".
If you want to look for principles which do not derive there certainty from empirical verification, true a priori principles, you should look to mathematics. I already suggested two possibilities, the equality between units, and the order. I'm starting to think that order may not be truly independent of experience, because it may be derived from the experience of temporal order. So let's look at the equality of units.
How is it that we know, with a very high degree of certainty, that there is an equal difference between one and two, two and three, three and four, etc.? Where do we derive this idea of equality? It seems that in all empirical observations we see no examples of such absolute equality. However, we seem to know with absolute certainty that there is an absolute equality with respect to the difference between the integers.
I'm sure it also determines how they appear...
Quoting Thorongil
Yep, never disagreed on this.
Well Tesla certainly didn't like Non-Euclidean geometry :P - but regardless, whether you call them attributes of space, or properties of space, it's the same thing really.
But amongst philosophers Orthodox Christians can be very different from each other. It's one thing to read Tolstoy, and a different thing to read, for example, Berdyaev. You'd claim that these two are also more heretical than they seem at first, and yet they are both Orthodox Christians.
Another thread!! :P
Only if by "how" we mean that it determines that things appear in the plural.
Ah, but I said "orthodox," lower case. Perhaps it's true that one can be an unorthodox Orthodox Christian. Perhaps that's what you are, but you appear unorthodox in either case.
One can believe something without claiming it to be the truth.
Why stop there? The fact that 3D Euclidean space allows for a plurality of objects is true, but Euclidean 1D space doesn't for example. So clearly the individuation and the extent to which it is possible is governed by the geometrical properties of the space in question. So why stop with just those properties that ensure individuation? In fact, you necessarily bring about all the others if you try to do that.
O:)
One can believe something without knowing it is true, but I think it's just definitional that to believe something is to regard it as true.
How would you define believing something then?
The latter is really just a degree of certainty or if not then it's just pure logical plausibility.
Because I have to. That's where my knowledge stops.
Quoting Agustino
No such thing exists. You're just referencing a mathematical model. That model, whether it's accurate or not, is not and cannot be identical to that which it is a model of, otherwise it would be the thing and not a model. I don't know how many times I need to say this.
If you possess mediate knowledge of something called "Euclidean space," or any other kind of space, that's great, perhaps you possess an extra special kind of cognition. But I don't.
Quoting Agustino
I'm pretty sure doubting the Trinity is a big no-no for them.
You're still believing that something's true here, namely, you believe it is true that something else could potentially be true.
But you also presuppose a model of space which individuates. That model of space isn't the space itself... And as space is ideal (as opposed to empirically real), how can something ideal be other than of the same kind a model is?
Quoting Thorongil
Well I don't doubt the Trinity, because I said I believe it. I just don't understand what that means.
But that is what you're doing.
In Kant/Schopenhauer, knowledge necessarily involves perceptual and conceptual content (since they join both rationalism and empiricism). Geometrical judgements involve a spatial perception a priori (not an empirical perception) structured by the form of space itself. As you yourself note, lines are not material objects. So they can't be perceived empirically. How are they perceived? They are perceived a priori, through the form of space itself. Thus, if they are perceived a priori through the form of space itself, a form in which experience is then given, that means that no unperceivable feature of space can be found in experience, because if it is found, then it should have existed in the intuition to begin with.
So to structure it as an argument:
1. For something to be knowledge, it must contain both perceptual and conceptual content.
2. Geometrical objects and their properties are not empirical objects
3. Only empirical objects are perceived empirically
4. From (2) and (3) it follows that geometrical objects and their properties cannot be perceived empirically.
5. Geometrical objects and their properties are constructed and perceived a priori in the form of space provided by the cognitive faculties
6. Non-Euclideanness is a geometrical property that isn't / can't be perceived a priori in the form of space provided by the cognitive faculties
7. From (6), (5), (4) and (1) it follows that non-Euclideanness isn't a known geometrical property of any geometrical object since it only has conceptual content without any attending perception (rationalism without any empiricism) (it would contradict [1] if it was known) - it is neither perceived a priori (by [6]) neither can it be perceived a posteriori since it is a geometrical object/property (would contradict [5] or it just wouldn't be a geometrical object or a property of one (by [4]).
8. (7) is false
9. Therefore one of the premises is wrong.
Possibly (1), (2), (5), or maybe even (6) - I've seen people arguing that non-Euclideanness can be intuited but that's very rare. (2) can't be attacked since lines can nowhere in nature be perceived. (1) could be attacked, but bye bye to Kant and Schopenhauer's synthesis of rationalism/empiricism. (5) is the only possibility remaining granting (1) and (4), so can't really be attacked. An attack on (6) would just not be granted by most - few would say non-Euclideanness can be perceived a priori.
No I haven't. Not a mathematical model at any rate.
Quoting Agustino
What you term "Euclidean space" is a phantasm, something created by the model itself. It has no real, independent existence and has nothing to do with what space may be in itself (which is unknowable and unthinkable).
Quoting Agustino
Yes, but they are derived empirically, and this is where I part company with K/S. This also negates premise 4 in your argument, since points and lines are abstractions from the world of perception. So all geometry is ultimately based on empirical observation, but what we observe empirically isn't space but objects that are in space, which is to say, objects that are mediated, in part, by space. The two simply can't be separated out, as Tesla says. And here's Berkeley: "Extension, figure, and motion, abstracted from all other qualities, are inconceivable." A "matter-less space," such as "Euclidean space" would have to be, is a contradiction in terms. That being said, it is still true that we perceive and therefore know space, but this perception and knowledge is a priori. What I mean by a priori is not "based on reason alone," but "logically prior to experience." What this means is that space cannot be caused to exist by a Divine Mind, and so I part company with Berkeley, because it is an inseparable ingredient in causality itself, which is the union of space and time.
Become a Schopenhauer fan, you know it's good for you.
Is it?
I'm not sure.
I think Schopenhauer has this magical ability to convince anyone he is true and right. I feel in love with him after reading his aphorisms.
Ahh, but on what grounds have these disagreements arisen? I feel as if it were a matter of taste and feelings, eh? Not everyone buys into his pessimism, although the pessimist can never be more wrong than wrong.
Yeah, and a lot of people like to reject him by making ad hominems. Some in the secondary literature try to offer actual arguments against his positions, of course, but I've never been very persuaded by them.
So it seems you are denying premise (3) [you can't deny 4, that is a conclusion]. So you think non-empirical objects are perceived empirically. I'd say this is just false. Or alternatively, you think that there can be purely conceptual knowledge, void of any perception, such as the geometric objects which are abstracted from perception a posteriori (this is a denial of [1]). If you deny (1), then you have negated S/K's foundations.
Quoting Thorongil
What does being mediated by space entail?
Quoting Thorongil
If you know space a priori, in what does this knowledge and perception consist?
This is the closest to my view, but I would say that conceptual knowledge, such as what mathematics reveals, is not "void" of any perception, since it is abstracted from perception.
Quoting Agustino
That we perceive a plurality of objects, which, along with their being in time, are in causal relation to each other.
Quoting Agustino
Once again, this question is technically unanswerable, because to do so would commit the category mistake I talked about. Space cannot be separated from the whole of cognition. That is, it cannot be thought of apart from time and matter.
Do not mistake the objects of our experience for objects existing independently of experience. No object can exist independently of experience, for all objects presuppose a subject. So there can be no space as an object that exists independently of experience, which you seem to think. Can there be space as an object that exists within experience? No, because I experience no such object. If you think we do, I would simply ask you to point it out to me. Can there be a physical space based on geometrical and physical models? Yes, and this, I suppose, would the be 4D space-time of modern physics, but these models are themselves based on experience, which, again, does not contain space as a distinct object within it. We don't experience 4D space-time, as you have noted before, which means it cannot be said to have any independent existence; it's just something that drops out of the model. That it agrees with our experience does not mean it is our experience or that it must be posited as existing outside of experience. If you think it must be, then tell me why. So where does that leave us? I say it leaves us positing that space is a priori. It's not something found in experience and can't exist independently of experience. It's an essential ingredient in our ability to experience at all.
An abstraction is not a perception though. Lines are nowhere to be found in your experience. In fact Berkeley did the right thing and denied the existence of abstractions independently of any perception.
"It is agreed on all hands, that the qualities or modes of things do never really exist each of them apart by it self, and separated from all others, but are mixed, as it were, and blended together, several in the same object. But we are told, the mind being able to consider each quality singly, or abstracted from those other qualities with which it is united, does by that means frame to it self abstract ideas. … Not that it is possible for colour or motion to exist without extension: but only that the mind can frame to it self by abstraction the idea of colour exclusive of extension, and of motion exclusive of both colour and extension"
You have to do the same to be consistent.
Quoting Thorongil
Okay fine that works, but this is no longer Schopenhauer's/Kant's position. Your new position has to reformulate what knowledge consists in, in a framework that is separate from S/K, such that there can be purely conceptual knowledge, or simply denying that mathematics consists in knowledge , or re-conceptualising mathematics along different EMPIRICAL lines (like Berkeley - §122 in Principles), and hence denying that mathematics of any kind as is most often interpreted consists in knowledge.
But this is basically what I did just say: "it is abstracted from perception." Obviously the abstraction is not empirically perceived, but your use of the word "void" was unclear, for I took it to mean "not derived from perception."
Quoting Agustino
With respect to this one issue, yes. But I still don't think it affects much of the rest of Schopenhauer's system.
Quoting Agustino
I would lean toward this.
What do you mean much of the rest? It certainly affects the overall structure of it, in quite a significant way. That it doesn't affect a lot of the insights Schopenhauer had, sure.
I think this conversation is somewhat tedious, unimportant, and one-sided, for we are really just confronting the problems with assuming that the world as presentation is the world entire. If we stop short at the presentation, or the first book of the WWP, then we face insoluble problems, including the one we have been discussing. In one sense, Schopenhauer accepts realism, in that we can posit a mind independent world of matter, space, and time as the necessary condition for, and in which arose, knowing beings. However, such a world is not even thinkable without presupposing a subject and so cannot be said to exist with certainty. I was born, acquired ever more control over my faculties, and through them surmised that I am a product of a world that existed before my birth. At the same time, I could never know this world absent said faculties, and thus in another sense I appear as though I came from nothing
Schopenhauer is a materialist, in part, and a Berkeleyan idealist, in part. He affirms both. "But they are mutually incompatible," you will say. Correct. Schopenhauer calls this an antinomy of knowledge. How does one solve the antinomy? Not by picking a side. One must find the common essence of mind and matter, and that essence is the will, which is neither a mind nor a material thing. I have always read Schopenhauer in this way, as a neutral monist. So this explains my incredulity at times concerning your objection and the cautiousness of my replies, e.g. "I lean toward," "I could grant," etc. It makes little difference, from this new perspective, whether space is an a priori concept, an a posteriori object, or both. The will has manifested itself as a world in space regardless. How it has done so is an ancillary and much less interesting question to me. The mere fact that it has solves the fundamental problem in philosophy. It also doesn't negate the bedrock claim of Schopenhauer's that there can be no object without a subject and no subject without an object. These are correlates. They stand and fall together. Take the subject away and there is no objective world. Take the object away and there is nothing to be conscious of.
So, you believe on the basis of authority and not on the basis of your own intuitions? I cannot relate this; it is not how I operate at all. I lean towards the trinity, for example (of which you have, somewhat confusingly said both that you are "not big on it" and that you "believe it") because it makes the most intuitive sense to me, more than absolute monism does.
This is not to say that I thoroughly understand it; I don't think anyone can thoroughly understand it (or absolute monism for that matter). This should be no surprise, I have no doubt that even on the mundane level we routinely believe many many things we do not thoroughly understand.
Yes, I also agree in fact with this insight. My personal view on metaphysics is probably still closest to Spinoza - one substance with two parallel attributes, thought (idea) and extension (matter). The one substance is the thing-in-itself, and the attributes are the two ways of looking at this same substance. I think this insight is still at its freshest and purest in Spinoza.
Quoting Thorongil
This reminded me of this video (note I don't agree with everything there):
Quoting Thorongil
Yes, you'd need this more Berkeleyan route into it, rather than the Kantian.
Yes, because my intuitions don't tell me anything to be honest with you
Quoting John
Yes it's not essential for me - doesn't have much practical import - but I believe it, without knowing what it really means.
Quoting John
How come it makes sense? I don't really understand what "intuitive sense" means... You either understand something or you don't...
It means that intuitively it feels right. If we are made in God's image why should we not be able to know the nature of and truth about ourselves by what Zen refers to as direct knowing, otherwise known as gnosis, or more mundanely, 'what feels right'? Surely you don't believe that the truth about us can be discovered by empirical investigation or logic, do you? All the great religions have asserted, in different ways and with different emphases, the superiority of this 'inner' way of knowing over the 'outer' objectifying, rational discursive intellect. Where do you think the scriptures come from in the first place?
Can the thing in itself have a point of view?
Why not? I don't see how "what feels right" is anymore likely to be correct than empirical and rational investigation, in fact quite the contrary. According to "what feels right" everyone has a different opinion, and there is no way to decide what is right. For example, look at us two. For you it is intuitively obvious that the Trinity feels right. For me it isn't. Who is right and how can this be determined? Certainly not by appealing to what feels right, because that's different for both of us, and therefore we cannot determine according to it. We must determine according to what we have in common - reason and empirical investigation.
Quoting John
Maybe, but then this doesn't make much sense to me. You always see me around here complaining, especially against Wayfarer, with regards to this mental masturbatory mysticism.
Quoting John
Insight gained by the natural light of reason.
Quoting John
No, I meant point of view as a logical criteria indicating that the thing-in-itself is more fundamental than subject and object, and therefore subject and object are both ideal - not real. Only Substance exists and is divine - the modes and the empirical world are illusory.
Yes, I view Spinoza as a neutral monist. For a very long time, I counted myself a Spinozist because I thought he offered a solution to the mind/body problem of Descartes. But while he provides the blue print for how to solve it, his actual solution I was never fully convinced of. Kant merely states the same problem in different terms. When reading Schopenhauer, however, I thought, and still think, his notion of the will is the best solution.
Quoting Agustino
Oh god, I hate that video. The voice, special effects, and music are way too pretentious. I actually think I was banned by the original maker of the video for pointing this out too.
The distinction really doesn't make sense though, for every rational of "outer" thought makes use of the intuitive. All our observations and reasoning are intuited in the first instance. Before I can pick out an object in the world, I need to understand what it is, else I won't spot it even when it right in front of me.
Rather than an opposition of "inner" (intuited) and "rational" (observation and logically derived"), there is only the "inner," logic and meanings understood, from which "rational" understandings are born. Any instance of knowledge amounts to "what feels right."
Yes but even Schop. abandons it for thing-in-itself ultimately. And don't forget that Spinoza does have the equivalent of will - it is called the conatus, which is our essence. I think Schopenhauer also anthropomorphises the Will to a certain degree - Spinoza does no such thing, that's why his system remains in my eyes pure.
Quoting Thorongil
>:O LOOOL! I never comment on youtube, but I agree with you on those points. He does point out the central bit regarding neutral monism though, hence why I was reminded of it. And its extravagance makes it memorable :-O >:O
Exactly!
Is there any other coherent view? Either things as experienced just 'brutely' exist (whatever that might mean) and there is no in itself, or the in itself gives rise to the phenomenal world in some way we have no hope of rationally understanding. If the latter is true then do you think we should conceive the in itself as a "great mind" of which our 'little minds' are fragments, or would you prefer to think of the in itself as mindless, which would just be back to the materialist view that things just 'brutely' exist, wouldn't it?
If you accept that the in itself or in Spinoza's terms 'the one substance' is both an infinite extension and an infinite mind (and an infinite number of other attributes, of which we can know only these two) then would not time, space and causality originate, just as we and our minds must be thought to, in that greater mind (and for Spinoza, body) that is God? So, even if time, space and causality are 'generated' by the human mind, since the human mind is 'generated' by God, they must also, ultimately be 'generated' by God, no?
How can the in-itself be mindless if mind arises out of it? :s
Quoting John
As I said your deductive brain is working well :P
Yes, this just is the intuitive intellectual insight that goes beyond merely empirical investigation and logic. Even Spinoza acknowledges this with his "sub specie aeternitatis'. It is not controversial that Spinoza accepted intellectual intuition, and that Kant denied it. (This is where I part ways with Kant). I am not clear where Schopenhauer stood on this pivotal issue.
What 'feels right' is not more likely than rational empirical investigation to be right about empirical matters, obviously, but we are not talking about that, are we?
The will is still the thing-in-itself for us, just not the thing-in-itself entirely. And Spinoza may arrive at a similar conclusion, but I think he does so invalidly. Schopenhauer's identification of bodily movement with acts of willing is much more convincing to me.
Quoting Agustino
What? How?
Maybe, but I am saying that effectively this is then not really significantly different than Berkeleyanism.
No, he acknowledges it with the third kind of knowledge, scientia intuitiva
Quoting John
Obviously he accepted it.
Quoting John
Why would we consider it to be more likely to be right in other non-empirical matters? It's on these non-empirical matters that we in fact disagree.
Berkeley is a monist, one substance which is mind. But that's an anthropomorphism, that's my only complaint.
By this:
Quoting Thorongil
Quoting Thorongil
How so? He clearly identifies the conatus to be our essence. The conatus is literarily the will
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus
In a sense, yes. Not the one most people think of though, which is why Spinoza is so frequently misread as a pantheist (rather than recognised as acosmist). For Spinoza, God is not a body in the usual sense (distinct individual states of the world), but Substance, the infinite and unchanging truth.
When "God causes" it doesn't not mean that a state of the acts to make the world one way or another. Rather, it means that, logically, given the world in-itself, no other outcome is possible. If I write this post, then is must happen, God necessitates it. By Substance, this state (me writing this post), cannot be anything else and so it amounts to the occurrence of this state over any other possible event. God is an expression rather than a casual actor.
I's a very long time ( about twenty years) since I studied Spinoza, but my memory tells me that he thought that seeing things 'under the aspect of eternity' is the highest form of intellectual intuition.
Quoting Agustino
It's not obvious if you're not familiar with Schop, but in any case what puzzles me is that you seem to want to both deny it and affirm it.
Quoting Agustino
Of course there will be disagreement as people may have different intellectual intuitions. I don't see why that should surprise you. People's understandings may be on different levels, and sometimes the differences may be only apparent due to interpretive or definitional issues.That doesn't mean that there cannot be a more or most correct intellectual intuition. Remember that all intellectual formulations are necessarily more or less inadequate
Yes, but seeing sub specie aeternitatis also can include rational knowledge, not only what Spinoza calls intuitive knowledge. Both these two forms of knowledge are "adequate".
Quoting John
I affirm it as a rational intuition, not what "feels right".
Quoting John
So again I ask you - if we have different intuitions, how do we determine which one of us is more correct? You'll say you're on a higher level, I'll say I'm on a higher level, who is right? :s
Yes, I like to say, with Hegel, that the world is an expression of spirit. It makes no sense to say that spirit ( or mind) causes the world. But we have already cleared up this misunderstanding of yours, so I'm not clear why you're repeating it here.
You're using the term "anthropomorphize" very loosely, then. He's not saying that the will is like a human being, he's saying it is a human being, his essence.
Quoting Agustino
I'm not disputing this. I'm saying that how he makes this identification is not as convincing to me as how Schopenhauer does so.
And you wonder what I mean by world qua Spirit ......................... I mean exactly this kind of mystical nonsense...
I always understood that Spinoza regarded seeing sub specie aeternitatis as the highest form of rational knowledge, so yes it would obviously "also include rational knowledge" if this is correct. As I said, it's a long time since I read Spin.
Quoting Agustino
Fine, but I was referring to "what feels right" as the mundane manifestation of intuition. In any case, since intellectual intuition is not based on logic or empirical observation, what else could support it other than 'what feels right', on whatever level that is operating?
No one knows who is right, except God, or the person who really knows. Obviously it can never be proven since intellectual intuitions, as is well acknowledged, are not intersubjectively corroborateable. Your intellectual intuitions are only for yourself, you can never convince another by argument that they are correct. Someone will only be convinced by your evocative language when they recognize their own inner experience and conviction shining forth in what you say to them.
Why is Schopenhauer's identification of:
Quoting Thorongil
More convincing than Spinoza's? What is actually Spinoza's deficiency?
For Spinoza, the spirit is an expression of the world.
This is a critical difference because it eliminates the world's logical dependence on spirit. For thinkers like Hegel, spirit is still acting as a creator. It treats the world like it's something spirit acts to make, as if the logical truths expressed by the world were finite rather than eternal. Eliminate spirit and it's supposed the logical forms expressed by the world cannot be formed.
Spinoza points out this is a misunderstanding of the infinite. Eternal truths are never created of made, not even by spirit. Being infinite, they are always true and defined in-themslves. Spirit an expression the world cannot be without. There is no possibility of "meaninglessness" that an act of spirit needs to avoid.
Sub Specie Aeternitatis is a way of seeing reality non-empirically and it contrasts with sub specie durationis. Imaginative, rational and intuitive - these are forms of knowing, with the first one being inadequate, and the second two being adequate, with intuitive being the highest.
Quoting John
Reason?
The 'world as spirit' suggests that the world is spirit. This is not to say the same as that the world is an expression of spirit. In the first formulation spirit is wholly immanent, in the latter spirit is both immanent and transcendent. Actually this is where I depart form Hegel. As much as I think his philosophy comes closest to the truth of all the 'major' Western philosophers, I agree with Berdyaev that he, in the end, objectifies spirit, by tending to identify it wholly with the world.
He does what Voegelin says we should not: "Do not immanentize the eschaton." (I also disagree with Voegelin in his rejection of gnosticism, though).
The point of intuition is you know something. It's not based on anything other than itself. To say such knowledge is based on "what feels right" is to act like there is some means of knowing outside of knowledge itself. Nonsense.
"What feels right" isn't a reason for thinking anything, it a description of when someone sense they are right. Useful for pointing when someone knows something, but it's not support for any contention.
None of this has anything to do with what I have been saying, or even with what Hegel says. And I'm pretty sure that Spin doesn't even talk about spirit.
You are claiming we are capable of infallible intuitive knowledge; this is nonsense, we are not God. We may be able to know, but we can never know that we know in the sense of having absolute proof that we know; that's why faith is important.
And the kind of knowledge we are talking about does not come in the form of "contentions" that can be argued about. Read the mystics if you want to understand this.
I don't understand what this means...
Quoting John
Personally, I appreciate Berdyaev's ethics, and ethical insights - and political insights actually - but I disagree with pretty much the entire metaphysics.
Quoting John
:D my favorite political philosopher! Just this year I've gone through and took serious notes on his "New Science of Politics" where he outlines what he means by gnosticism and how it relates with his wider project, and I entirely agree with him. Hegel, Freud, Marx etc. are actually guilty of the gnostic structure of thought if you analyse their triadic systems... And after his attacks on gnosticism, I have no sympathy for that kind of mysticism anymore, not that I ever had much sympathy, because I don't like navel gazing. I spent sometime navel gazing once, and it wasn't very productive >:O
Perhaps... but that's because you keep missing the logical point Spinoza is talking about. Every time someone tries to point out what Spinoza is doing with Substance, and how it differs from just about all other metaphysics of Western philosophy, you play dumb to the point.
You equivocate what he is saying with others, like, for example, that he's saying the same thing about spirit and the world as Hegel. The point is Spinoza is saying pretty much exact opposite.
Any rational deduction must be valid. To be sound it must be based on true premises. The premises themselves are cannot be deductively proven, they are ultimately derived intuitive. So any piece of reason is only as good as the intuitively derived premises it is based upon.
OK, then your understanding of things is so different from mine that I fear we can have no productive conversation. As I already have said many times, these matters ultimately come down to taste, and there's no accounting for taste. If tastes vary too much then no agreement or sharing of insights is possible.
On the contrary, that's why "faith" is incoherent as knowledge. "Faith" treats knowledge as empirical. Supposedly, what we need to know anything properly, we need to "prove it" with evidence. It has no understanding that knowledge is intuitive, that some things are known without any sort of reliance on empirical observation. The mystic and the faithful treat this initiative knowledge like it is a contention which can be argued about.
In the face of initiative knowledge and awareness of necessary truths, the mystic and the faithful say: "But we don't really know for sure. Something else might be possible. I don't know God is Real. God might not be Real. I don't have empirical proof" or "We don't know that. It remains a mystery because we don't have an empirical proof." Their approach treats knowledge as it it is the very thing claim it's not.
I said just a few posts ago that I don't believe Spin talks about spirit, and I have never claimed that he say the same about the spirit and world as Hegel; that's pure misrepresentation.
What exactly do you want to say, following Spinoza, that I will "play dumb to". Again this is a strawman, with adhominous overtones. That's why I tire of responding to your posts; because I have to spend all my time dealing with your misrepresentations.
This is absolute nonsense; mystics don't say anything like what you are claiming they do. Have you ever read the mystics? Honest answer now...
Good for you! What points exactly do you disagree with?
For example, I read this essay of his just this past week:
http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1952_476.html
I disagree that Being reveals itself through the subject but not also through the object. I also disagree that we as subjects create meaning - rather I think that meaning is always already in the world. I disagree with that entire anthropomorphism of his in metaphysics. I find that disgusting actually. But I agree on social philosophy (socialism) and on ethical personalism.
How does this help to prove that the will is our essence?
Quoting Thorongil
Spinoza explains why it simply cannot be otherwise. Things which are contrary to one's nature cannot be part of one's nature, because then one's nature wouldn't even exist in the first place. So therefore one's nature - in order to be one's nature - must be aimed at seeking to preserve itself, simply because the opposite is a contradiction.
I know... but the point is Spinoza does talk about "spirit" (unity, infinite, Substance).
When I referred to the expression of Substance, you then compared it to Hegel's notion of spirit expressing the world, noting the similarity of infinite/unity, etc.,etc, between the two concepts, suggesting that Spinoza was merely talking about what Hegel was, that there was really no disagreement between the two.
You more or less do this all the time. When someone brings up a metaphysical philosophy which disagrees with yours, you ignore what its saying to claim it doesn't really disagree with yours.
As for what you could do, how about recognising some philosophies are making a point that disagrees with yours? That's why I say you play dumb. I'm pointing out you don't even recognise Spinoza is making a different point about metaphysics.
Can you cite the passage where I say this?
Read the second book of the WWP, lol. I'm too tired to summarize it.
I said:
To which you said:
[quote=John]Yes, I like to say, with Hegel, that the world is an expression of spirit. It makes no sense to say that spirit ( or mind) causes the world. But we have already cleared up this misunderstanding of yours, so I'm not clear why you're repeating it here.[/quote]
And then I said:
To which you the claimed:
You were the one to bring-up Hegel in comparison to Spinoza. Then, when I clarified how Spinoza was different to Hegel on this matter, you claim it has nothing to do what we are talking about.
The first passage is your statement; you did not mention Spinoza in it. I was responding to your statement about the incoherence of the idea that spirit (or God) causes (obviously thinking of 'cause' in the empirical sense here) the world, by saying that I agree with Hegel that the world is more rightly thought as an expression of spirit or God. Where did I make mention of comparing Spinoza to Hegel?
>:O I have, but I want to hear your thoughts about it, hence why I'm discussing it with you rather than reading WWR again :P
I was talking about Spinoza's God. My initial post in full, where the first paragraph mentions Spinoza by name twice.
Which was in a direct response to your comments about Spinoza:
Can you point to exactly where in that text you think Berdyaev makes the claims you say he does? I couldn't see it.
I don't see how you can generally disagree with anthropmorhism and yet call yourself a Christian. Christianity is, at least in most of its predominant sects. the most thoroughly anthropmorphic of the world religions.
"The fundamental problem of philosophy is the problem of man. Being reveals itself within man and through man"
"In man there is a twofold aspect: man is the point of intersection of two worlds, he reflects in himself the higher world and the world lower."
"Metaphysics is naught other, than a philosophy of human existence; it is subjective, and not objective, it rests upon symbol and myth. Truth and reality are not at all identical with objectification"
"Cognition bears a creative character and itself represents an act of positing meaning"
etc.
You're not reading very carefully...
We experience our body in two different ways: externally as an object among other objects, but also internally, and unlike all other objects, as will. To know what our body is internally, subjectively, and in-itself is just to know its essence. So our essence is will.
Your first passage only talks about spinoza's conception of the "body' of God. And of course it is obvious that God is not a body in the world; to say that would just be ridiculous. IT is controversial among Spinoza scholars as to whether Spinoza intended to identify God only with natura naturans or with natura naturata as well. If it is just with the former then insofar as the laws of nature are transcendental to the empirical world ( they do not appear as such in it) then God should rightly be thought as transcendent. Of course the laws of nature are also immanent in nature. On the other hand if the body of God is thought as the body of the world; if God is identified as wholly immanent, then we might think there is no transcendent aspect of God at all and that the laws of nature are nothing more than descriptions of how nature operates, that in no way are prior to, or transcendent of, created nature.
It's not an issue of careful reading at all, that is your assumption, as though there is only your interpretation of what Berdyaev writes.
It is an interpretative issue: I take Berdyaev to be merely saying, much as Heidegger does, that being appears as such only within human experience. I think this is correct insofar as I doubt that animals have a concept of being.
Metaphysics is necessarily subjective because only a subject can carry it out. There is no metaphysics without subjects. Again, I can't see why you, particularly as an admirer of Schopenhauer, would disagree with this.
How can truth and reality be identical with "objectification"? I take Berdyaev to be saying that without human experience and understanding there is no truth and reality. How could there be. We cannot even begin to say what there could be without human experience and understanding. This view is common to Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel (as well as the other German idealists) and Heidegger; so I cannot see why you would, while remaining consistent with what I know of your philosophical preferences, disagree with Berdyaev here.
And you haven't cited the passages that deal with
Quoting Agustino
I was talking about Spinoza's God full stop, not just whether there's a body in the world-- i.e. Spinoza's God is not any sort of bodily distinction or casual actor of any realm.
The point is not just God is not any particular existing state, but there are no other realms (i.e. transcendent) to which a bodily actor of God belongs. All logical objects are given in themselves.
Spinoza identifies God with both natura naturans and natura naturata. The former being expression self-causation (i.e. being a thing that acts or causes), the latter being the passive expression of caused modes (i.e. the logical expression of states of existence- e.g. forms, "laws of nature, etc.,etc."). Neither are a casual actor, whether that be in the world (e.g. a falling rock smashing a plate) or in logic (e.g. spirit making a world of logical expression where there was previously none or could be none).
Nor is this controversial. It's the basic contention of Spinoza's philosophy-- one Substance (God), not two (transcendent God and the world).
The problem is it makes the Ideal dependent on us-- the infinite becomes dependent on human experience. Without experience, there is nothing to know or understand. If human experience doesn't exist, then there can be no infinite truths. For God to be Real, we would have to exist. God would become nothing more than a worldly whim of particular humans living.
With the infinite, the point is to know something independent of our experience. Not in the sense that we can't know it, but in the sense that it maintains without us, that it is unchanging, even as we pass on or cease to be aware of it.
To say that there is a transcendent God and the world, ( and the relation between them: Father Son and Holy Spirit, perhaps) is not necessarily to say there is more than one substance. They are thought as 'three in one', but this thought is acknowledged to be inadequate to the Reality. God is certainly not universally considered to be the one substance in any case.
I understand that Spinoza contends one substance, and no transcendence, but I don't find the contention coherent. You haven't presented anything that convinces me otherwise. You just keep making unsupported claims.
Agustino said earlier:
Quoting Agustino
The fact is that there have been many conceptions of substance, substance considered variously along the lines of essence, identity or ground of being, for example. Under the two former conceptions of course there are many substances. Under the latter conception, it doesn't seem to make sense to say that there could be more than one ground of being. But this tells us nothing about that ground of being. Of course it might seem incorrect to say there are many grounds of being, and if we accept that to say that is incorrect, that still doesn't tell us that the ground of being is a unity; because the term 'unity' would seem to be as inapplicable as the term 'plurality' when referring to 'something' that is not part of what is experienced and may be investigated empirically. We are considering something here upon which none of our concepts can gain any purchase.
In any case I wouldn't be at all surprised if you were to claim that substance cannot be rightly thought as 'ground of being' either. If you think you have a coherent conception as to what substance is, then why don't you tell us what that is. I have challenged you to this before and you haven't come up with anything. Do you think substance is something more than merely a logical expression or idea, for example? If so, then what? I would be content to say it is right to think it is something more, but that we cannot say what that something more" is. Can you say what it is?
Okay, but it seems to me that this is no-way different than Spinoza proving objectively that the body cannot be anything other than conatus. Not merely because you experience it to be so, but because it simply could not exist if it was otherwise. Schopenhauer doesn't ground the will in the thing-in-itself the way Spinoza grounds the conatus in the Substance - he rather grounds it in your perception (but your perception could be wrong). That's why I say anthropomorphic.
I disagree - Being shows itself just as much in object as in subject
Quoting John
Metaphysics must be both subjective and objective in order to be a complete description of Reality though. So yes, obviously only a subject can be conscious of it, but that doesn't change the fact.
Quoting John
Yeah, it's all about human beings... :s This is just anthropomorphism at its best, at least you should recognise that...
Quoting John
The view that there can be nothing without human experience isn't common to, for example, Schopenhauer.
Quoting Agustino
I did provide a citation for this:
Quoting Agustino
Quoting John
Yes, this is Schopenhauer's point. Substance is non-dual.
Quoting John
I already quoted you what Spinoza defined substance as - that which exists in itself and is conceived through itself. Now if you have an issue with that definition, then please explain what that is. Or indeed, please explain what "something more" could substance be?
"[i]Kant bases the assumption of the thing-in-itself, although concealed under many different turns of expression, on a conclusion according to the law of causality, namely that empirical perception, or more concretely sensation in our organs of sense from which it proceeds, must have an external cause. Now, according to his own correct discovery, the law of casuality is known to us a priori, and consequently is a function of our intellect, and so is of subjective origin. Moreover, sensation itself, to which we here apply the law of causality, is undeniably subjective; and finally, even space, in which, by means of this application, we place the cause of sensation as object, is a form of our intellect given a priori, and is consequently subjective. Therefore the whole of empirical perception remains throughout on a subjective foundation, as a mere occurence in us, and nothing entirely different from and independent of it can be brought in as a thing-in-itself, or shown to be a necessary assumption. Empirical perception actually is and remains our mere representation it is the world as representation. We can arrive at its being-in-itself only on an entirely different path I have followed, by means of the addition of self-consciousness, which proclaims the will as the in-itself of our phenomenon. But then the thing-in-itself becomes something toto genere different from the representation and its elements, as I have explained.
The great defect of the Kantian system in this point, which, as I have said, was soon demonstrated, is an illustration of the beautiful Indian proverb: 'No lotus without a stem'. Here the stem is the faulty deduction of the thing-in-itself, though only the method of deduction, not the recognition of a thing-in-itself belonging to the given phenomenon[/i]" - Schopenhauer WWR Vol I, Appendix I
"The mistake at the root of this view, a mistake which has been fully revealed only by scientific development in the twentieth century, is the assumption that Newtonian physics is a permanently and incorrigibly true body of fact. It is not. But because Kant believed it was, he was bound to assume that everything about the a-priori forms [space, time, causality] and categories with which human sensibility and understanding were to be credited, whatever they were, must be such as would yield, and would yield only - and therefore must necessarily yield - a world which conformed to the laws of Newtonian science. All other possibilities must be ruled out" - Bryan Magee in Schopenhauer
So it seems that Magee also criticises Schopenhauer/Kant for extending the a prioriness to conceptions of space, rather than remaining with the fact that whatsoever conception there is, it will still presuppose a space that is not given in experience, and is thus not certain. In this regard, neither Euclidean nor Non-Euclidean geometry are anything more than conceptions of space.
So it seems that it may be most correct to say that what is a priori are the forms of space/time/causality, but the current conceptions we have of them, while logical and fitting with our current experience, could be wrong. However, we are always destined to have some conception of space/time/causality for the mere reason that they are forms of our perception - they are never given within perception, and we never perceive them, but we always perceive through them. "Everything about" them however is part of our conception whatever that happens to be, and it could turn out that this conception is wrong. But it can't turn up that we don't perceive mediated by space/time/causality. That is certain.
Schopenhauer's argument is empirical, whereas Spinoza's is rationalistic. I am more fully convinced by the former because it corresponds to my own experience and provides the key for interpreting the whole of nature.
Quoting Agustino
While Kant does say things like this, I think Schopenhauer is being slightly uncharitable here. Kant also says and would respond by saying that we must think that sensation is caused by the thing-in-itself, even if it may not be. We cannot but think this, because we cannot but apply the law of causality universally. This makes Kant inconsistent in his claims, but not incapable of being read such that he is free from Schopenhauer's charge.
Quoting Agustino
Ha! You've finally come around to my position I see.
Yes, but your explanation of it wasn't clear since you didn't address the status of the synthetic a prioris in relationship to space, time and causality. All that remains synthetic a priori is the form of space itself - perception mediated by space - and nothing else.
Berdyaev's point, as i interpret it, is that being shows itself at all only when there is subject. It is obvious that, understood analytically, being reveals itself only as object, as beings. I doubt Berdyaev, or any thinking person, could disagree with this.
Quoting Agustino
Truth and reality are conceived only by spiritual beings like us. If other animals have the linguistic, conceptual and spiritual capacity to conceive of truth and reality, then there would be truth and reality for them too. Are you denying this is so?
Quoting Agustino
None of the thinkers I mentioned would say there is literally nothing without human experience. Being appears in it fullness with human experience ('human experience' taken here to mean the experience of a rational, conceptualizing language using being).
Quoting Agustino
The sentence you cited makes no claim that meaning is present only to humans. It is obvious that natural signs would have meaning for animals, but they cannot posit that meaning if they are not capable of conceptual language.
Quoting Agustino
Spinoza's definition says literally nothing, because nothing can be "conceived through itself". Even God or substance must, at the very least, be conceived apophatically, through what it is not. Do you know what it means for something "to exist in itself"? Of course you don't, you only know what it means for things to exist for you. So, sure, as a negation of what it means to exist for us, we can conceive the merely logical idea of something existing in itself; but it cannot, discursively at least as opposed to poetically,intuitively or mystically, be 'something more" than a merely logical formulation.
So, it seems quite ridiculous for you to ask me what that something more could be when it is I that have been saying that it cannot be anything more (meaning something more for us, rationally, mind to emphasize that again) and have asked you to tell me what more than a merely logical idea it could be. In other words explain what you think the in itself is ontologically, or in terms of being. You and Willow keep insisting that the in itself is not unknowable and yet you are both incapable of saying anything about it beyond its minimal formulation as a negation of what we are familiar with; a negation of the 'for us'. The absurdity of your position is that the in itself is defined precisely as unknowable, as a negation of the knowable 'for us'.
This passage clearly shows only Schopenhauer's superficial reading of Kant. Kant specifically denies that Space and time and the twelve categories can be applied to the in itself. The in itself is "derived" from the empirical only apophatically, as a logical negation. Kant does get himself into some conceptual difficulty when he says that for there to be appearances there must be something that appears, but I believe he intends this only as a merely logical statement. IT would be illogical to say that there is an appearance and yet that there is nothing that appears.
Of course conceptual and linguistic difficulties will inevitably arise when we try to talk about the in itself.
The it-in-itself is no less "for us" than anything else. Our knowledge and experiences is not just empirical or logical relationships expressed by the emprical (e.g. "laws of nature" ). When we say that the it-in-itself is knowable, we are rejecting Kant's formulation of it as the negation of the emprical and knowledge.
Logic shows negation of the emprical is not equivalent to the it-in-itself. To say "not emprical" doesn't specify what we are talking about. Countless logical truths are "not emprical." If I'm talking about a negation of the emprical, I could be speaking about anything from 2+2=4, an statement of formal logic, Substance, a derivative equation or one of many others. Merely saying "negation of the emprical" doesn't say enough. It only points out I'm not talking about the emprical.
Each non-emprical turth is its own. It must be positively defined and knowable, be it 2+2=4, a formal logic statement, a derivative or Substance. Every non-emprical truth means something more than just "non-emprical," else it's more or less meaningless, for it's been reduced to what it is not.
That our conception of the in itself is for us is obvious, but it is conceived precisely as not being for us; in fact that is its definition. So, you are equivocating the fact that it is conceived by us, with the fact that it is conceived as being not for us.
Of course it is a negation of our entire experience and understanding and it is true that some of that experience and understanding may not be considered to be merely empirical; that depends on your worldview. I believe I have already said at least once that that it conceived as that which cannot be investigated either empirically or logically by pure reason, so there is no excuse for your continued disingenuous assertions that I have been treating the in itself as merely a negation of the empirical.
For Kant, no doubt. Not for Spinoza. His point is to say the it-in-itself is "not for us" is mistaken. The argument is Kant's defintion is mistaken. I'm not equivocating "for us" with the conception of it being "not for us." The argument is "not for us" is mistaken in the first instance-- a failure to recognise that the it-in-itself is its own thing and knowledge, a mistake akin to saying because we know something is not an apple, we can't know anything else about it.
This is what I meant about you "playing dumb." You can't even concieve others are using a different definition to you. Everytime you discuss metaphysics, you talk like everyone is using your own definitions. Rather than address people's argument as it is given (even if that ends in disagreement), you morph into a sycophant of Kant, as if the only possible terms anyone could use in a metaphysical discusion were Kant's.
I depends on what you mean; to say that we perceive mediated by space, time and causality is not necessarily the same as to say that we perceive spatially, temporally and causally. The latter is perfectly obvious and absolutely unarguable.
Come on this is just dumb. The in itself cannot be for us because it is defined as not being for us. Otherwise it would not be the in itself at all, but would be the for us. You can say there is no such thing as the in itself if you like, but that would be to say something different. Even Spinoza speaks about the infinite attributes of God of which we can know only two: extensa and cogitans. Spinoza does not claim that we know all that God knows or is, so even for Spinoza there is, logically, an in itself. If substance is defined as that which is conceived in itself, then since we cannot conceive anything in itself we cannot know substance. These are the kinds of inconsistencies in Spinoza that lead me to refer to his philosophy as "naive". These inconsistencies also render any attribution of his philosophy as a philosophy of pure immanence incoherent.
That's why it not dumb. The split between our knowledge and the it-in-itself is rejected. Under Spinoza, the problem you assert isn't present because the it-in-itself is not defined by being beyond our knowledge. Kant's definition has been rejected. We can conceive the it-in-itself. No doubt it says something different to Kant, but the point is still about the it-in-itself. The inconsistency you are reading comes from you inserting Kant's definitions rather than using Spinoza's.
We do not need to know all that God knows to be aware of the it-in-itself. The it-in-itself is but one truth of many. Knowing it doesn't tell you about anything else. Like any instance of knowledge, understanding the it-in-itself is limited, only one of the many truths.
Here you are equivocating knowledge of the it-in-itself with having knowledge of everything ( both logical, emprical and anything else). That's not required to understand the it-in-itself. Indeed, it's an outright contradiction. The it-in-itself is no other truth.To content we must no everything (including all emprical states) to understand the it-in-itself is to entirely miss what it is about.
Why change the term to "it in itself"? The 'in itself' is just the logical idea of what cannot be known even in principle due to our finitude, or more correctly, the finitude of our modes of discursive knowing. We are not ourselves finite at all, I would say. So, Spinoza's infinite modes of God are unknowable to us and thus qualify as the in itself.
Typically, you haven't addressed any of the points I have made that present difficulties for your position. You prefer to change the subject instead it seems.
To make a point about Spinoza's Substance in relation to Kant's philosophy, how you misunderstanding Spinoza's philosophy because of the Kantian defintions you are smuggling in when reading Spinoza.
That's the exact equivocatiion I was talking about in my last post. Spinoza's infinite modes of God is about the nature of our knowledge as finite states. We can never know everything because, as our knowledge experiences are finite, any one only picks out a small part of what is knowable.Whatever we might know, there is always more to know.
Rather than saying we can't know the infinite, it's pointing out our knowledge cannot be infinite. Not even when we know an infinite (e.g 2+2=4, Substance, the definition of a form, etc. ), do we have infinite knowledge.
Our experience might capture an infinite, but that's as far as it goes. In that moment, we do not experience the knowledge of countless other finite and infinte truths. Spinoza is pointing out our knowledge is never infinite, not saying we cannot understand infinites.
None of this has anything to do with what I have been saying. You are just playing with words; conflating 'infinite' in terms of quantity with in-finite in the sense of 'not finite'. Sure there is always more to know in the sense of what we could in principle come to know. But what lies outside our possible discursive understanding, for example Spinoza's 'infinite attributes of God', is obviously not part of that 'more' that we could in principle come to know.
Exactly; I think you miss the point of Berdyaev's mysticism here. It is all about human beings.
Okay, but when I judge things I tend to judge by what the philosopher has written, not by what I could get him to agree on. Undoubtedly Berdyaev has a lot of insights, especially in ethical and political matters that I've found valuable. His metaphysics though doesn't appeal to me much, but maybe I don't know it well enough yet. There's still a lot to be read by Berdyaev.
Quoting John
Well animals may not have concepts, but they perceive reality as well. Dogs, cats, etc. can be surprisingly intelligent, compassionate, and so forth. It seems to me that they have a spiritual life as well, although it clearly isn't conceptual/discursive, the way our human spiritual life can be.
Quoting John
Ok, I don't disagree with this - we have whatever faculties animals have and reason in addition. Although there are some animals having faculties of perception that we don't have - bats for example.
Quoting John
But they can understand the meaning, that much is obvious. To understand the meaning of something does not necessarily require to put it into concepts. But because animals don't have concepts, they don't have access to meta-cognition. That's what reason is - a form of meta-cognition, seeing yourself from the outside as it were.
Quoting John
What about Existence? What do you conceive existence through, if not through itself? What about God? Is God to be conceived through another?
Quoting John
How so? You can conceive God or substance apophatically - by analogy - but Spinoza would say this isn't the highest kind of knowledge.
Quoting John
I think I do. Something exists in itself if it doesn't need something else to exist. I don't exist in myself, because I need a lot of other things to exist.
Quoting John
But what more would you expect it to be discursively? This is what puzzles me. You obviously expect it to be something more. Why?
Quoting John
What if there was no distinction between appearance and reality?
Quoting John
Well, for me it is the same :P lol
This - this is the core of your disagreement. The point is your position, transcendence + immanentism is incoherent. It just is contradictory, you cannot uphold both. God cannot be both transcendent and immanent, that is nonsense. So in order to argue for yourself you have to explore antinomies - what are antinomies, and how are they different than paradoxes? You can prove your position apophatically only if you can prove with equal rational validity both immanence and transcendence. Then you can claim that me and Willow and everyone who adheres to only one position is being dogmatic and refusing to see the other half. Then you'll have to drop both transcendence and immanence as ultimately meaningless (on a rational level at least) - the slumber of reason - reason's inability at moving beyond this point.
I agree this is the core of it, so there's no point going over all the other point by point responses, you have made until we clear this up first. So, to begin, and just to clear up any misconception, I am not claiming that God is both exhaustively immanent and exhaustively transcendent; that would indeed be a ridiculous contradiction. I am saying that God is, from one perspective, immanent and from another perspective transcendent, and that neither of those perspectives are the ultimate truth, and also that neither of those perspectives is privileged over the other; they simply represent two aspects, so to speak.
To draw an analogy from your beloved Spinoza, according to him there are only two known attributes of God; extensa and cogitans, but God has infinitely many attributes which are unknown and presumably unknowable, since we are not capable of knowing anything which does not fall into one of the two categories; extensa and cogitans. Following this to its logical conclusion extensa and cogitans could be considered as immanent aspects of God, because they are intelligible to us, but the infinitely many unknowable attributes must be considered as transcendental, because they are beyond any possibility of human experience and understanding; we just know, according to Spinoza at least, that they are real attributes, but we cannot know what they are. So, if God can have just two attributes knowable to humans, and infinitely many unknowable, then tell me why you still think God cannot be rightly considered to be both immanent and transcendent.
This could have been the case - however - all attributes are necessarily parallel to each other. This is similar to the performance of music and the musical score - they are parallel to each other - the same thing seen from two different perspectives. More attributes would just mean more perspectives, but they'd be perspectives over the same fundamental thing - much more, they'd be parallel perspectives.
That God has in it more perspectives than humans have access to is no doubt - God is infinite. But this does not mean that God is transcendent - since those are still perspectives over the same thing as thought and extension are. They aren't perspectives corresponding to a different Substance at all. They cannot reveal an unknown about Substance. All that they could reveal is what we already know from thought and extension - or better put what we COULD already know from thought and extension (as being finite we never know everything there is to know)
I don't think we can understand even how extensa and cogitans can be "perspectives over the same thing". I think that they are is just assumed to be so because they are the only two categories that define everything we experience and think. We don't really understand at all how they ultimately 'fit together' (Mind/Body Problem). How much less could we understand how the infinitely many other attributes of God could fit with our experience when we cannot experience them.
For me this means they count as transcendental to our experience, not immanent to it. But if you are using 'transcendent' and 'immanent' in some different way than I am, then we could, for sure, just be talking past one another. That's language games for you! Either way the fact remains that there is much (an infinite amount according to Spinoza), which will always remain not only unknown, but unknowable, to us. And this, to return to the OP (somewhat) is what I would refer to as the 'in itself', that which also counts as 'transcendent' or 'transcendental' (I don't think there is a cogent distinction between the tow terms, as some folk do).
We do know, that's why we established the reality of the One Substance. The attributes cannot but be two parallel perspectives, since underlying them is One Substance. The attribute parallelism is derived by Spinoza from the One Substance metaphysics. To use the example from the video - serotonin in the brain just is a feeling of happiness. One doesn't cause the other, rather they are always correlated with each other, because they are simply two different perspectives on the same underlying reality.
Quoting John
I think Spinoza would say we clearly do understand this, as there is no mind/body problem at all. The mind is the body seen under the attribute of extension, and the body is the mind seen under the attribute of thought.
Quoting John
Well to me, One Substance means immanence.
Quoting John
Nothing is unknowable according to Spinoza, only unknown. Unknown simply because we can never know every empirical thing that is possible for God.
I have no idea what this means. It seems like empty word play to me. Can you explain it to me?
Quoting Agustino
How can we know anything from perspectives that are not possible for us?
In substance dualist terms, half of what they call "mind" is of extension. Our existing experiences are states of the world, are "material," part of a unified "body"-- when we talk about these, we are speaking about our bodily states (e.g. fingers, brain, experiences). Our bodily states in terms of extension.
On the other side, the states of the body we recognise are of mind (e.g. the meaning of fingers, brain, experiences). It's us recognising the meaning of our bodies, the significance of our bodies in meaning and logic, in terms of the attribute of thought.
Thus, there is no mind-body conflict. The presence of consciousness and body is self-explanatory. They are parallel truths. When a body exists (e.g. fingers, brain, experiences), it necessarily comes with meaning (e.g. significance in consciousness experience, in logic, in thought).
That statement doesn't make sense. A perspective isn't an instance of knowledge. It's being or viewpoint.
Spinoza is not claiming we can know something from a perspective that's not possible for us. Rather, he is saying that some perspectives (God) have knowledge we do not, and that we cannot ever access that amount of knowledge because we only have a finite viewpoint. He's not saying that something is unknowable, rather just that many things are unknown to us when compared to God.
If God has perspectives that consist in knowledge we do not, then we do not know what those perspectives consist in. They are unknowable perspectives to us and we are not justified in saying anything about them, even that they exist, and certainly not that they are parallel with the perspectives known to us, as Agustino suggests. To say this would be to commit a "fallacy of misplaced concreteness". So, the in itself is really just an epistemological notion that defines the category of what we cannot know.
There is a mind/body problem only insofar as we can never know what the ultimate connection between mind and matter is or even what they really are: whether one or the other is primary or they are equi-primordial, whether they are just parallel perspectives on 'one' thing, the nature of which is both or neither, and so on. That's why these questions don't go away, because many philosophers do not settle for glib answers. On the other hand I would say there is no mind/body problem if you think that there must be a definitive answer; that is, because I believe there can be no possible definitive solution to the question. Extensa (the space of measurement and causes) is incommensurable with cogitans,(the space of measuring and reasons). We can say they are two incompatible parallel perspectives ("incompatible" because parallels are defined as never meeting) on one thing; but that cannot be more than just empty word games as we don't really know what it means because the space of reasons and the space of causes are two different word games and we can't see the purported "one thing" they are supposed to be parallel perspectives on.
In addition to that we do not know where extensa and cogitans come from. We can posit God, but we don't know what God is. Thus some consider Him as a freely acting trinity and others consider it as a necessitously acting unity. There are many, many conceptions of God and substance. They are all manifestations of limited human understanding; although I do believe that some are more apposite than others.
All your talk just seems like tossing word salad to me, unfortunately; I see no wisdom or understanding in it all; just continual glib denials of our limitations. Somebody recently said on another thread that Wittgenstein showed philosophical systems to be just parkour games with words, and I think, although not without certain reservations, that is right.
Quoting Agustino
You could take a million examples. Feeling happy is serotonin released in the brain seen under the attribute of thought. Serotonin released in the brain is feeling happy seen under the attribute of extension.
Quoting John
You don't know anything more by knowing the feeling of happiness than you do by knowing serotonin is released in the brain and so and so organism behaves in so and so a way after that. You know the same thing from two different perspectives. Another perspective on top of that would add nothing to your knowledge - it would just be another perspective on what you already know. Sure you don't know that perspective - but that's only an empirical matter, because metaphysically you do know the substance underlying it, since it's just the same substance that underlies what you already know through thought and extension.
I think enough has been said on this issue already. I don't think we are going to agree. For me, the identity of seratonin in the brain with happiness is a non sequitur. If they are two perspective on one thing, then what is the one thing?That the two are often correlated is what we know. That happiness just is seratonin in the brain is merely an inference.
We know what happiness is intuitively by feeling it, Deep truths are deeply felt; if you deny this then you deny the reality of the non-discursive truths inherent in poetry. music, in aesthetic, ethical and religious experience. If you want to deny the importance of feeling truth, then that is not something we can really argue over; it comes down to personal taste. As Wittgenstein said the most important things lie outside the world, they consist in that of which we cannot speak and must remain silent. I take him to mean that we cannot speak of these 'things' and must remain silent about them only in the discursive or propositional sense of 'speaking', he is not referring to poetry and the other arts.
So then, what are you doing around here trying to speak of them?
Quoting John
Why are they correlated?
What do you mean? I'm here speaking about my own take on these matters. I don't see your point.
Quoting Agustino
Again, what do you mean? I don't understand what you are asking.
What is your explanation for the correlation between serotonin in the brain and happiness. Why are they correlated?
Quoting John
Well it seems to me that you want to talk about precisely what Wittgenstein says cannot be spoken of.
I don't have an explanation for it. I don't believe any one does. Do you have an explanation for it?
Quoting Agustino
I am not trying to make determinate claims about transcendent truths. I am talking about our situation vis a vis transcendent truths. I am saying these truths can be felt, and expressed via the arts, and I am saying that they cannot be expressed propositionally. It's the wrong language game if you want to put it in Wittgensteinian terms. So, for example, I consider the spiritual truth of the Trinity to be infinitely greater than the purportedly rational truth of neutral monism, they are of entirely different, incommensurable kinds.
Yes - they are two perspectives of the same thing, so they are necessarily correlated. They couldn't be two perspectives of the same thing if they weren't correlated. That's why the perspectives are parallel - you cannot have element X from one without having element Y from the other.
As I see it you are just playing with words; you haven't explained anything. What is the the "same thing" they are two perspectives on?
Substance. Substance being a metaphysical category cannot be an empirical one - thus you cannot ask what is it, the way you ask what a chair is....
Perhaps you do, or think you do, but I don't have any idea what that means. If the two were merely perspectives on one thing as Spinoza claims, then happiness could not cause release of serotonin, and release of seratonin could not cause happiness. But we don't know that. Release of seratonin may cause feelings of happiness as, for example, when you take certain drugs or feeling happy may cause release of seratonin, as, for example, when you are in love. It may a two way causal street. I think very little is known about all this.
And indeed they don't cause it - that's precisely the point!! Thought cannot affect extension.
Quoting John
No there is no causation, just the pure correlation. Why do you move from the obvious truth that they are always correlated to the falsity of a cause? Their correlation has to be explained, nothing else.
That is just an opinion; you have no way of knowing that.
Quoting Agustino
That they are always correlated is not "an obvious truth at all". Have you ever seen them being correlated? And even if you had that would just be one case or some number of cases; you are not entitled to infer from that to "always". You misunderstand the nature and truth status of scientific hypotheses apparently. And even if they are always correlated, you haven't explained the correlation at all; you've just defined it as "two perspectives on one substance" which is just playing with words and doesn't tell us anything at all.
Can a thought kick a stone? No. If the two realms interacted causally, we would see a lot more expanded causation between the two.
Substance. Reality itself.
This move distinguishes Spinoza from most other Western metaphysics. In Western metaphysics, most have tried to eliminate perspectives, to reduce the reality to one particular idea, entity or force, such that we can say by knowing this, we understand or experience the full extent of reality. More that, this method of "explanation" is considered the goal of metaphysical inquiry, to find the equation which predicts everything or the system which shows why consciousness is defined.
Spinoza is pointing out this metaphysical practice does not understand logic and its relationships to the world. It denies the limitation of perspective, proposing there is some way to reduce all to a single origin , which logically defines without any reference to the world itself. Since perspectives are distinct and unique (whether we are talking about a person, a cat, a rock, the finite, the finite), reduction to a single accounting side, entity or force cannot occur. In the presence of different perspectives, there are necessary many logical distinct definitions running parallel, within the same reality.
One cannot have the mind without the body and vice versa. To suggest mind without body fails because it turns the infinite of thought into a finite presence. On the other hand, to suggest a body without a mind is incoherent, as it would mean the body had no meaning or expression in logic.
To avoid incoherence, mind and body must be two perspectives of the same reality. They cannot be squished into one notion of origin or cause that accounts for everything. Unity must be an expression of perspectives (i.e. perspectives express Unity), rather than Unity being an an explanation of perspectives (i.e. Unity accounts for all perspectives).
That's obviously a ridiculous example. It's a more subtle matter than that. We simply don't know what the relationship between thought, emotion, desire and so on, as subjectively experienced and neural processes is; and probably never will, because the ways the two are experienced are so different.
Actually, we do. The causal relationship of "thought" presupposes extension. Someone's thoughts causing events is entirely possible. What matters though is, under Spinoza's system, these thoughts are extension. If my thoughts cause an event, then finite states of existence, instances of my experiences, are doing the causing.
Thought as Spinoza uses it, unchanging logical meaning, what others might have called "form," is not causal. It doesn't exist. It's timeless. Meaning never changes or causes.
All you are saying boils down to the fact that we don't see minds without bodies; and that no bodies are seen at all without minds. Yes, that is the human situation. We try to imagine the independent existence of bodies without there being any minds, but it is always a mind imagining it; so we can't really do it; although we do mostly, in this scientific materialistic age, tend to think that bodies were around long before minds were there to enable them to appear. As to whether there can be minds without bodies; we simply don't and cannot know the answer to that because minds cannot be detected by the senses.
It's not ridiculous at all, it's simply the only plausible explanation for our experience as far as I can see.
All this relies on the unproven ( and I would argue, unproveable) hypothesis that thoughts are 'really' nothing more than physical events. I would say this is really nothing more than a prejudice which reflects the basic presuppositions of our scientific materialist age.
NO... it asserts just the opposite.
The point is thought not a physical event at all. It's not finite. It's unchanging. By the nature that is more than a finite event (it's timeless), thought cannot be causal. To suggest thought causes is to assert it is only a physical event-- nonsense.
(this is why instances of our experiences causing events are extension).
Well, I don't think any untestable explanation like that can rightly be thought of in terms of 'plausibility'. Plausibility is relevant only to hypotheses that we might think are verifiable or at least falsifiable. And even falsifiability is replete with problems if you take a look at some contemporary philosophy of science. As Hume noted what we think is likely or plausible really comes down to mere habits of thought.
That's if you believe Hume. I don't find that to be the case. I find that we believe something to be plausible when it is coherent.
If thought is not physical and it is yet real then there is something real which is non-physical. This brings us back to Descartes. The 'interaction' problem his philosophy is charged with, is itself based on the assumption that because we cannot conceive how the non-physical could interact with the physical that therefore the non-physical could not possibly interact with the physical. I think this assumption is nothing more than a prejudice due to ignorance.
It's not surprising that we cannot conceive of how the non-physical could interact with the physical because we understand causation in terms of energy exchange; in terms of the interactions of physical forces. Causation really, apart form our hypotheses concerning forces, is a matter of observed correlations. And we cannot directly observe correlations between thoughts and physical processes. We know there are thoughts at all only subjectively. My thoughts can never be observed by others; or even directly by myself; I know their existence only in the thinking of them.
Then why is there so much disagreement? The question is 'coherent according to who, or coherent with what set of presuppositions'?
Because people never think about those things generally... And even when they do, many are still confused, not to mention that such things don't have much value in earning money and stuff that most people care about.
I am referring to disagreement among people who do think a lot about those things; disagreement among philosophers that is. Spinozism, for example, has not become the universally accepted metaphysical system by any means, even despite the fact that Descartes is currently out of favour and we live in a scientific materialist age. You might accept Spinozism, but do you really believe it is the ultimate answer and that you know better than all the contemporary philosophers who do not accept it, and do really believe their lack of acceptance of it is due merely to ignorance?
The interactions problem is born of Descartes thinking of thought as only physical. He takes what is physical, our existing experiences and proclaims them to be in infinite of thought.
In doing so, Descartes mistakes the infinite (thought), for finite human experiences (extension), leaving us with the "gap" of how we can be infinite ( have minds and experiences) when we are only finite (a body).
Our "minds (i.e. existing experiences)" were never thought. They are only finite states. We have our body (extension) and experiences/ "mind" (extension) interacting as finite casual states. We were always a mind (extension) and body (extension). There is no non-physcial interaction with our bodies to resolve all explain. It's an illusion generated by Descartes' misunderstanding of human minds and thought.
You are misinterpreting Descartes if you think he believed thought is physical. Textual evidence for this claim?
It's a base claim of his philosophy- he doesn't distinguish between meaning (the infinite of thought) and the existence of experiences (existing minds). He equates these as the substance of "Mind" or "consciousness."
My point here is not that Descartes thinks mind is "only physical" in those words, but rather he equates the physical (existing experiences) with an infinite (thought), forming a system where thought is understood to be equivalent to existing experiences.
Do you think for example that Descartes is unfairly out of favour today?
Quoting John
Well most philosophers earn their money based on the diversity of their research. If Spinozism became the only accepted position, there'd be a lot less opportunities for publication...
I think Descartes is often unfairly maligned and undervalued as a philosopher. Personally, I am not a fan of substance dualism; but then I am not a fan of any substance ontology at all; as you may have gathered.
What I will say is that we are faced with two kinds of phenomena, two spheres of experience; the mental and the physical. The first is known from the so-called first person perspective and the second from the so-called third person perspective. We have reasons to believe that thoughts interact with (their own) bodies, although we can't be sure whether there is really any interaction or only some kind of "parrallelism" (pace Leibniz or Spinoza). Or perhaps the physical is an expression of the spiritual (this position is not necessarily any form of idealism, by the way).
We can only grope and intuit when it comes to these kinds of questions, because they are not really subject to empirical investigation. It comes down to taste, as I see it; there are no demonstrably correct answers, and every formulation is probably inadequate anyway.
I don't think the real task of philosophy is to answer these kinds of intractable questions anyway, but to get out from under the influence of them. It doesn't really matter what you believe about metaphysics; you can live an equally good life regardless.For that something else is needed; which cannot really be spoken about. I believe it consists in intuition, in ethical, aesthetic, religious and spiritual feeling, which is to say, faith and experience, and the activity those kinds of faith and experience lead to.