This Old Thing
Hey guys, any of you remember way back in December when there was that argument about archefossils and Schopenhauer and Idealism? I promised then to outline my dissatisfactions with Schopenhauer's 'solution' - endorsed by TGW - to the archefossil problem (or pseudoproblem, depending on your view.)
I worked on a post for a couple weeks but it quickly became cumbersome. There were 3 or 4 avenues of attack that seemed promising, but I couldn't get them to sit pretty together as parts of a larger whole. On top of that, no separate avenue seemed persuasive unless dialectically worked out, through simulated dialogue with an opponent. The post started to get really long, kinda too long.
I felt - and still feel - confident in the criticisms, but the hassle and frustration and lack of time eventually led me to abandon the whole thing. Now that I've got a few months of relative free-time, though, I'd like to revisit this. I think it would work best as a socratic back-and-forth, if TGW - or anyone who shares his view - is down.
To refresh, the deal with the archefossil is that it purportedly proves a time anterior to consciousness.
Schopenhauer's 'rebuttal' goes like this:
So for TGW or anyone who agrees with him, I guess I'll start with these twin questions:
In reference to an 'archefossil, is the statement 'this fossil is x [where x is a date before the advent of consciousness] years old' true?
In reference to another artifact, dated using the same techniques, is the statement 'this artifact is fifty years old' true?
(Feel free to qualify, if necessary.)
I worked on a post for a couple weeks but it quickly became cumbersome. There were 3 or 4 avenues of attack that seemed promising, but I couldn't get them to sit pretty together as parts of a larger whole. On top of that, no separate avenue seemed persuasive unless dialectically worked out, through simulated dialogue with an opponent. The post started to get really long, kinda too long.
I felt - and still feel - confident in the criticisms, but the hassle and frustration and lack of time eventually led me to abandon the whole thing. Now that I've got a few months of relative free-time, though, I'd like to revisit this. I think it would work best as a socratic back-and-forth, if TGW - or anyone who shares his view - is down.
To refresh, the deal with the archefossil is that it purportedly proves a time anterior to consciousness.
Schopenhauer's 'rebuttal' goes like this:
“The world as idea, with which alone we are here concerned, only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time. Since, however, it is the most universal form of the knowable, in which all phenomena are united together through causality, time, with its infinity of past and future, is present in the beginning of knowledge. The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past it self is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past. Accordingly the past out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent upon the knowing subject, without which it is nothing. It necessarily happens, however, that this first present does not manifest itself as the first, that is, as having no past for its parent, but as being the beginning of time. It manifests itself rather as the consequence of the past, according to the principle of existence in time. In the same way, the phenomena which fill this first present appear as the effects of earlier phenomena which filled the past, in accordance with the law of causality.”
So for TGW or anyone who agrees with him, I guess I'll start with these twin questions:
In reference to an 'archefossil, is the statement 'this fossil is x [where x is a date before the advent of consciousness] years old' true?
In reference to another artifact, dated using the same techniques, is the statement 'this artifact is fifty years old' true?
(Feel free to qualify, if necessary.)
Comments (473)
So, I don't think that an idealist, or phenomenologist has to actually suggest that past events, or pre-perceiving/thinking things events never occurred at all, they must simply hold that the possibility of their thought, comprehension, inference lies in analogy to our experienced events, and world.
I won't commit to defending everything Schopenhauer says, but I think he's basically right.
I'd answer yes to both questions, and then add 'but it only became true that they were that old at some point in time.' In other words there wasn't always a linear timeline -- that's a temporal development.
This kind of talk does violence to ordinary language notions of tense -- it doesn't make much sense to say that only at a certain point in time did something in the past come to have occurred at that point in time. Natural language seems to view time as quasi-linear and viewable from an 'eternal' perspective. But that's okay -- I think you have to invent technical concepts to do interesting philosophy.
I don't think any violence is done to common sense by saying e.g. "it was only at some point in time that it became true that Alice was ten years old." Most people would agree. They'd say that the point in time at which it became true that Alice was ten years old was a point ten years after she was born.
So I'm assuming your later characterization is more what you're aiming at: Not that something presently becomes a certain age, but presently comes to have occurred at a certain time in the past.
Is that fair?
If so, at what point in time did it become true that the fifty year old artifact came into being in 1966?
Yeah, so the right formulation would be 'it was only at some point in time that Alice came to have become ten years old in 1987,' or something like that. That doesn't make much sense if the timeline is fixed.
Quoting csalisbury
When time became linear and quantifiable. Schopenhauer seems to treat it as an all at once thing, once presentation exists it has its necessary forms which includes time. But I doubt there is any non-human animal that experiences time linearly in the appropriate way, and certainly there are none that can quantify it (in fact, some humans cannot even really quantify in the way we think of it, or so the anthropological reports seem to suggest).
A realist is going to say time was quantifiable all along, it just took us a while to gain the skills to do it. That's probably the crux of the debate.
When exactly? I don't know, at some point near the end of evolutionary history -- linear roughly when you can think in tense, and quantifiable roughly when you have numeral terms and apply them to a cycle.
Also, to get the tense right, you'd have to say 'the time at which it became true that the artifact would come into being in 1966.'
Quoting csalisbury
Is fine, assuming we don't go back before 1966. But once you do, you need to change the past tense to a past-future with would. So it would be:
Asked this way, answering 'before 1966, of course' is perfectly intelligible, assuming you've just got a standard deterministic position about time once linearized. So yeah, I'd say it follows, but if you don't keep the tenses straight you might think there's a problem with the philosophical position that really arises from weird grammar.
What's at stake in the case of a fossil is the moment when it when its creature lived, not that's been quantified (that's done entirely in the present).
Schop doesn't take the argument far enough. It's not just our present which has no beginning or end. That's true of every moment, including the lives of fossilised creatures, the formation of planets or the presence of mountains. Realism is concerned about the existence of things without the presence of experience (which we sometimes know of in our present) not whether they are quantified or not. You and Schop are still stuck treating these lived moments as if they are points on a linear time.
There is one truth here: is the artifact come into being, there was a moment when it was there, in 1966. Our knowledge of the event or what happened prior doesn't matter to this truth. Logically, it was that moment defines the presence of the artifact in1966. The presence of the artifact can't be cited as necessary (inevitable, going to happen in the future) be any prior state or moment on a linear timeline.
A non-determinist might say that at that point, it was neither true nor false that it would come about in 1966.
But these issues have to be resolved regardless of whether you talk about Schopenhauer's retrojection of the past.
In other words, the indeterminist seems to be committed to the felicity of things like 'It will rain, but that's not true, of course.'
It's a complex question and tbh one that I think is more a linguistic matter about how tense functions in language and not that interesting metaphysically.
The determinist is right because what ever happens in the future will happen. There is always a truth of what is going to happen. We just don't know it most of the time. Yet, the form of determinism you seem to be discussing here is also wrong, because those future events are not an inevitable outcome of what happened before. At any time, anything may or may not happen. The future which will happen is only defined in the moment of its occurrence.
Just as the non-determinist argues, what happens is always in the process of becoming. They are, however, wrong there is no truth about what will happen in the future. In a world where an artifact is created in 1966, the truth of that moment remains even in previous years, for it is about what happens at that point in 1966 rather than anything that's true about a past year.
Such analysis is doomed to failure becasue you are treating moments as if they all together in one moment of a linear timeline.
To this question there is no "when." You are either wrong or right. In the moment of tomorrow, it either rains or it doesn't. There is no point where you change form being possibility right, to possibly wrong, to right, or to wrong.
At any time, you are both possibility right and possibly wrong (as it may or may not rain tomorrow) and either right (if it rains) or wrong (if it does not).
It seems to me yes. A lot of philosophers dispute this, so maybe people don't have robust intuitions on this issue. But yes, I'd say clearly you were wrong then -- you said it would rain, and it didn't. In fact I can contest you at the prediction time and tell you you're wrong. If we all knew that future statements could never be true or false at the time of utterance, such a dispute would be literally nonsensical, and we'd all have to be massively ignorant abut how our own language works. It makes the ability to talk about the future, and the point of it, a sort of mystery. If the indeterminist were right it seems to me we'd never make future claims or argue about the future, but just wait around til things happened and only then dare to talk about them.
Quoting csalisbury
There is some recent work by a guy named John MacFarlane that takes this stance about future claims, and essentially says that when uttered, they have no truth value, but when assessed from after the time the event happens, they retrospectivey become 'true all along.' Very wild stuff -- I'm just not sure how accurately it tracks actual linguistic behavior.
Surely without doing some sort of weird logic, to say you were wrong then is the same thing as to say 'you're wrong now' at the time of utterance. Otheriwse, you're saying you were wrong then, but weren't wrong then (!) Not that this can't be reconciled with formal tricks, but the question is, do you want to.
Quoting csalisbury
A determinist is just going to deny that, though. It either will happen or it won't. You might assign subjective probabilities based on your information, but that only reflects your ignorance, not a metaphysical indeterminacy.
Quoting csalisbury
Sort of, yeah. The way we're forced to think about time in our present temporal conventions makes us see it as linear and determined, because of the way we have to think about cause and effect. But again, I think these are only present conventions that will disappear, and so will the linear timeline. And even in the present, I tend to think of these things as just conventions, of a sort -- if you like they're dictated by the logic of our language and customs, but don't have any interesting 'reality' outside of that. They're like maxims or rules for how to think about things -- if you place yourself within those rules, you have to follow them.
TGW's approach to determinism in their last post is pretty good. Though, I don't think it will satisfy you becasue it doesn't go into the metaphysical indeterminism which accounts for the possibility of any logically coherent existing state at anytime. Your aversion to TGW's analysis seems to be the idea determinism eliminates possibility.
Anyway, if you just want to keep going in circles with TGW, I'll leave you to it.
Well no, its end and beginning aren't now, they're in the future and past respectively.
I'm not sure what you mean by what determines the conditions.
As for the conditions. When consciousness blossomed, it didn't happen in a void. There was still both hunger and places where the food was. Why was the food in this place and not that? And why were these conscious beings hungry?
I'm not sure the determinist position as I've outlined it here makes any commitment to causality. I think it's intelligible to say that right now 'will p' is true or false, but at the same time there's no determinate causal path leading to p in the future. I'm not saying that's not right, just that it's not clear to me it is. It's a very weak kind of determinism. It could be that 'will p' is true, but only because of your free choice.
Quoting csalisbury
I don't know if it's inexorable either. I think 'will p' is not the same thing as 'must p' or 'must will p.'
Quoting csalisbury
Hunger is definitely older than linear time and older than objectivity. Where the food is is a kind of ethical projection: the food is where my hunger gets satiated. The existence of food as a discrete cognizable object is a projection of hunger.
Quoting csalisbury
It depends on whether you're giving an explanation of ordinary language or not. I kind of buy into the 'two truths' thing, or Henry's two kinds of speech. I think it would be pointless to talk about this Schopenhauer stuff in an academic context, for example -- the academy is part of the world. I mean, I don't 'really' think time is deterministic, because in the end all of our temporal conventions are just that. The realist reifies them.
I have trouble limiting myself. It's probably my biggest problem. If there're six movies in my netflix queue, I have difficulty enjoying any one of them. The other ones might be better. But I also think fisking can fracture and enervate a conversation (tho I'll admit I fisk frequently). I'll have to focus on one avenue of argument here.
I'll choose this. You didn't answer my question about hunger and sources of food. You spoke abstractly about what hunger is and how it works. My question is, for this newly-minted conscious being, why is it that satiation lies in zone x and not y? It may be that the existence of food as a discrete cognizable object is a projection of hunger. Well and good. Why does this sudden beneficary (or torture-victim) of consciousness project food in zone x and not zone y?
Then you've got it backwards, it's not that you pop into being and get hungry and then the food pops up elsewhere. It's more that the entire schema for trying to navigate the world is built around hunger, and to help satiate it a method of objectifying and distinguishing so as to satisfy it consistently grows up. A dog doesn't really think 'that's food,' it just sort of feels hunger urges and makes instinctual movements with its mouth when it smells and feels certain things. That's like us, only our urges are more convoluted.
I agree that the being was hungry before that moment.
Do you agree that these beings are dependent for their satiation on the contingencies (where the food is) of a world that pre-exists them?
That humans have a world is just a way of saying we have more convoluted and sophisticated ways of navigating and manipulating our hungers of various kinds.
So the hungry being was hungry and projected a world in which the satisfaction of its hunger lies in zone x and not zone y. Let's imagine that zone y is right next to it and zone x is further off. Why did it project food in zone x and not zone y?
So it's not up to you where the food goes -- where the food ends up is just a projection of the way your hunger works, which you're not in control of.
It's funny that this world, which comes after, is utterly indifferent to the needs of the hungry being. It depends on this being, but is in no way tailored to its needs. The food may even be out of reach!
It seems clear that this hungry being has no conscious control of the world it creates. It has to follow clues to understand its contours. Why does the world have these contours? Why is the food in zone x and not zone y? It may be the case that "world" exists only because the being is hungry. But why does this world exist. That's really the crux. The question is not why does a world exist? But why does this world exist?
Yeah, but it's not like there's some real thing outside of the creature that it then has to use a kind of sensory apparatus to go find. The mystery of where the food is just is the mystery of 'how do I stop the pain?' The world presents itself as having this kind of externality as a sort of crutch to facilitate eating.
Quoting csalisbury
It depends on what you mean by indifferent. In one sense that is obviously false and in fact there is no world at all without these needs -- the world is literally just a projection of those needs, and so has a kind of illusory or dream-lke quality to it, and disappears to the extent that those needs cant be intelligibly managed, because the pain (or pleasure) is too intense. But it has no inclination to be kind or easy or pleasant, because the hunger isn't. A truly indifferent world -- one without pain or pleasure -- would be nothing at all.
So think of it not like, 'why did you make such a mean world?' No one made the world, it was forced to grow out of pain and strife, and is just a kind of embodiment of that pain and strife.
Quoting csalisbury
Because the hunger works in a certain way. It's not that the hunger somehow causes the world to sprout out of it as something separate. The hunger never goes away and the world is never separated from it. The world having a certain shape is just hunger taking that very shape.
When you can do this, the concrete methods of changing the flux of suffering around get reified into distinct shapes -- a worldly object in a way just is a bundle of those possibilities (I'm a little uncomfortable with that way of putting it though -- I'd rather say, that in a sense it is nothing, hence the world's dreamlike quality, rather that a sort of concrete shape is posited or given credence as a way of helping or managing the suffering, as a kind of guidepost that is very often not reliable. But that is also confusing because it makes it seem as if there is some sort of constituting mind which has the power to 'make' these things, which is not the right way to put it).
The world then presents itself as external and prior to, and causing, the suffering because this is a kind of reflection of the fact that our sufferings are not generally under our control, and so the concrete shapes (the objects) seem to 'precede' them and be their source. What I am suggesting is that it is the other way around: it's not that we can't control the world because it's external, but rather than the world is external because we can't control it. And this in turn just means we can't control (except in very limited ways) our suffering.
And in one sense you could say that an external world gets 'made' in this way, but in another you could say it doesn't because there is no such thing, so of course it can't get made. The external world, like linear time, is a kind of convention that arose, but doesn't really hold up on its own terms (hence philosophy's frustration with the 'external' perspective being forever unable to capture the 'internal perspective).
Can you explain this in more detail? This seems to be the Schopenhauerian notion that Will is the thing-in-itself, and our representations are manifestations of this metaphysics. It seems like you are saying, similarly, that our suffering desires for more creates the representations. Can you explain the implications of this for what it would mean for a real external world.
I don't really preserve the distinction between world as will and world as presentation as strongly as he does, though -- at best the world as presentation claims to be distinct from the world as will, i.e. something objective that is 'just there,' independently of how one feels about it. And so I could say that presentations are just a certain kind of willing. That might just be a terminological variant, though, since Schop. both says that presentation and will are entirely distinct sorts of things, and that the former is the objectification of the latter.
The desire doesn't always have to be for more, but that could be a part of it. It could also be a need to stop the pain, e.g. the pain of hunger, the pain of heat, or whatever.
I am guessing you are also considering the idea of evolution in all this as well? Organisms have survival strategies that are mainly about fulfilling desires for survival. Before the first consciousness, was the willing there? If one was to combine panpsychism with Schop, then you can say that if everything has a mental/Willing nature to it, whereby it is "there" due to its "willing" nature, then by definition, all things had willing aspect, thus dissolving the issue of what came before the first consciousness. However, this will definitely seem like a fanciful stretch to many.
So in one sense all things have a willing aspect, sure -- but only insofar as 'all things' is just whatever things are projected as a result of will. I don't think there's any coherent 'everything' to talk about and say that it has a single nature, or a nature that's somehow shared with or rooted in us. What's outside the will is 'nothing,' sure, but only 'nothing to us,' because we literally couldn't comprehend such a thing. I think it still might be in some way efficacious on us, though, which is why we experience things as ultimately just happening to us for no reason -- there's no way to see 'behind' our suffering, and so there is a kind of blindness where our suffering seems to encompass everything, yet at the same time we have no account of its origin.
But anyhow.
Being (1) is hungry, it satisfies that hunger, grows hungry again, satisfies that hunger. So forth, until it dies.
Being (2) is hungry. It satisfies that hunger. Grows hungry again, cannot satisfy that hunger - the 'clues' are scarce, no 'food' presents itself, it agonizes and dies.
The contingent distribution of food in a world external to these beings, it appears, cannot account for the difference in their respective fates. Is it that the pathe of being (1) happily enough manifest themselves as plentitude while the pathe of being (2) manifest as scarcity? Is this a fair way put it? Agony manifests as distant objects of satisfaction to...maintain itself as agony?
If not, what's a better account?
Second question. Or really a scenario I'm interested in your explanation of:
There's a human and there's a squirrel. Let's say the human is lonely and enjoys feeding squirrels. It throws bread (or w/e squirrels eat) into the yard from its second story porch
This human - through whatever endlessly intricate, labyrinthine twisting of its desires- has come to occupy a world where it can see a piece of bread, a squirrel, the porch etc. as things with their own independent identities. The squirrel, on the other hand, follows 'clues' to satisfy its hunger. It smells the bread and scampers toward it, propelled only by the movements of hunger.
All the while, though, the human watches on (either in aesthetic indifference or through some libidinal sublimation where the squirrel's satisfaction dimly satisfies the human. Who cares. In any case, the human can see the bread as a stand-alone object with nutritive qualities*.)
How does this work? The human can give an account of the squirrel's movements: the squirrel was triggered by the piece of bread they chose to throw into the yard (which could just have well remained in the kitchen.) Yet, according to your account, the object of satisfaction cannot be disentangled from the hunger. The squirrel's hunger must be what accounts for the bread. Yet the bread existed, already, in the human's kitchen and need not have been thrown. The human chose to throw it, to trigger the squirrel, to watch it move toward it.
A very simple scenario. How would you explain what's happening according to the position you're advocating?
*To get one potential red herring out of the way immediately, it is obviously true that without hungry beings, there can be no 'food.'
As opposed to the way people often present the waking world as being in philosophical reconstructions: in reflection people often put up a difference between waking life and dreaming that, on observation, is not there. There are very important practical differences between the two, but not metaphysical ones deducible from observation. In other words, if you ask people to explain what makes dreaming seem so 'unreal,' you'll find that every phenomenological character of dreaming they offer is found in waking life too.
Quoting csalisbury
Yeah, you have to reverse the way of thinking about it, from contingently distributed food leading to different pathe, to contingently distributed pathe leading to different food-projections.
There is a way in which we can try to explain our hunger, first in lay terms by saying we need to eat, and trying to remedy it through causal mechanisms by finding food, and then technically by exploring the biological mechanisms of hunger. But all these things are ways of trying to deal with hunger from within, by working out ways that it can be diminished and acquiring a taste for new signs along the way. These explanations are in the end attempts at controlling the hunger, which might be successful or not. There's in a deeper sense no real 'explanation' for it, since explanation presupposes hunger.
Quoting csalisbury
To the extent that a human and squirrel can recognize in whatever dim way they they are in the presence of the same object, some bread, it is because they are similarly constituted in their suffering. We can only understand as existing alongside us those things that make us suffer or suffer with us, and squirrels do suffer with us, to a limited extent. The bread is intelligible as a piece of food for both of us because the squirrel is intelligible as hungry, not vice-versa. This is just Husserl's idea that the notion of an intersubjective or objective world is dependent on the alter ego -- but cast in pathetic rather than intellectual terms.
The throwing of the bread is itself a way that the human knows how, given his awareness of this co-sufferer, to ease its hunger. For the human that manifests as an object in his kitchen moving. For the squirrel, it may just seem like the solution to its problems are raining down like manna from heaven. And this is because the human is smarter, in the sense that it is more adept at manipulating its own suffering and that of others. The human can see the action as intricately interconnected with a web of other causal effects, the squirrel can't. And that's because the squirrel is inept at resolving its own suffering and that of others in a way a human isn't (a human can empathize with a squirrel: can a squirrel empathize with a human? It seems a dog can).
He then expands (in a different book):
Wicks is surely wrong to say anyone can stand outside of the strange loop just described (except maybe in aesthetic experience or in the denial of the will), but I think he explains the idea quite well all the same. I might also add that this problem, or paradox, is resolved by the will. The materialist collapses the mind into brain or subject into object, while the idealist collapses the brain into mind or object into subject. Schopenhauer says that each of these views is true, but deficient, since they mutually presuppose one another. Whatever the true nature of reality, it is neither material nor mental. So Schopenhauer advocates for neutral monism, which then becomes voluntarism when he identifies the nature of reality as will, which is neither a material object nor a subjective idea.
Thanks for this. I never knew there was literature surrounding this idea.
Let's tweak the example. Imagine a courtyard bisected by a large stone wall. In one half grows an oak. In the other there's a fountain. On the north side of the courtyard is a city street. There are tall apartment buildings on each of the other sides. Some awful kid, out of sheer sadistic pleasure, tosses a sack containing two squirrels over the wall and into the courtyard. One squirrel falls into one half, one into the other. A man watches all of this from an apartment window. One squirrel collects acorns. The other slowly dies.
This oak and these acorns have existed long before the squirrels arrived. (Let's say our apartment dweller is a sort of hikomori who spends hours each day observing the courtyard. If you need an observer to guarantee the existence of this courtyard, he's your man)
Let's take this [quote= The Great Whatever]Yeah, you have to reverse the way of thinking about it, from contingently distributed food leading to different pathe, to contingently distributed pathe leading to different food-projections.[/quote]
In this example it is clearly the case that, for the squirrel, a contingent distribution of food is what leads to their respective pathe, not vice versa.
Let me immediately nip one potential response in the bud.
Obviously, if the squirrels were not hungry, they would not need the acorns. Clearly, hunger is the condition of possibility for both its suffering and its flourishing. It is also the condition of possibility for the acorn's being considered food. But whether the squirrel flourishes or suffer, in this example, depends entirely on where it happens to land in relation to the food. As our hikomori can attest, these trees and acorns have been here long before the squirrels arrived. The question, once more, is not why hunger exists at all, but why the agony of a hungry being exists in this case, not in that. In this example, the contingent distribution is quite clearly the cause ('occasion', if you prefer) of the agony. The agony does not cause the acorns to be distant.
Now, to the hikomori. He's the heir, I suppose, to a long line of pathe-masterers. He's so adequately satisfied food-wise, that his hunger can take the form of interest in courtyards and interest in squirrels.
If we wish to maintain that this or that world cannot come about before this or that hunger, and since these acorns quite clearly precede the squirrel's desiring-them, we must look to to the hikomori as the world-shaper. Is he somehow 'outwilling' the squirrels through his abstract - yet still hungry -contemplation which shapes the courtyard?
(Bonus question: If the hikomori were sick that week and couldn't make it to the window, which squirrel would suffer and why?)
[quote=The Great Whatever]In other words, if you ask people to explain what makes dreaming seem so 'unreal,' you'll find that every phenomenological character of dreaming they offer is found in waking life too.[/quote] Yeah? One of the things that make dreams surreal is that a single individual can shift shapes and faces from moment to moment.
I think dreamlike here means the phenomenological appearance of the analyzed world. We either live in a metaphorical dream in an unanalyzed world, or we confront the world and analyze it only to find that it reminds us of a dream.
The hikkimori doesn't need to be watching. His watching is irrelevant, unless of course he wants to help one of the squirrels out. If he does watch, what he is seeing is not a bunch of previously unrelated objects coming into relation: he is seeing the suffering of these creatures unfold and interact, in ways that spring from his own suffering and ability to empathize with them, i.e. to recognize them as living creatures.
A squirrel eating an acorn is what a squirrel satisfying its hunger looks like. To say that one squirrel can eat and the other can't because there is a tree on one side and not on the other is merely to report what the fact that we see a tree there told us in the first place -- that 'over there,' is where you can get something to eat. Seeing the acorn is seeing where the food is.
Quoting csalisbury
The same is true of waking life. Sometimes it takes a little longer (and sometimes it doesn't) -- but what does it matter?
It would certainly come as a surprise to the guy in the apartment that there cannot be an acorn in one part of the yard without the possibility of there being a squirrel. Why just yesterday, the day before the squirrels arrived, he looked down and saw acorns in one section and not the other. & What's more - this poor uneducated soul didn't know that there existed any creatures that ate acorns! He just thought they were the (aesthetically satisfying) seeds of a particular species of tree. Had acorn-eating beings never existed, could there be no acorns? Or would they only exist with reference to possible future species who might eat them? As far as I know, gold-eating beings don't exist. Is there no such thing as gold?
[quote=tgw]In the example, you're assuming we can take for granted that acorns just 'exist' independently, and that is how you set up the example, as if the squirrels just came along to something independently established and only then interacted causally with it.[/quote]
What's wrong with my example? Do there not exist courtyards containing things that might be eaten which were created without reference to those things that might eat them? Empirically, this is flagrantly false. I took great pains to stem this kind of rejoinder. Our apartment dweller looks out at this park every day. If you need the courtyard, with its oaks and acorns, to depend on something else, something that suffers and desires, he serves this function just fine.
[quote=tgw] To say that one squirrel can eat and the other can't because there is a tree on one side and not on the other is merely to report what the fact that we see a tree there told us in the first place -- that 'over there,' is where you can get something to eat. Seeing the acorn is seeing where the food is. [/quote]
Except the hikikomori had no idea that acorns even were something edible! And yet he still saw them, day after day. Do you think it is impossible for such a person to see acorns?
[quote=tgw] The same is true of waking life. Sometimes it takes a little longer (and sometimes it doesn't) -- but what does it matter? [/quote]
Well I've never had the experience, in waking life, of identifying the same person as e.g. both my mother and, later, x from work and having no problem with that. I guess I can't think of anything like that in normal life. I suppose you could get around that with formal or metaphorical tricks. But would you want to?
I'm not sure about that. Is possibility of something is same as its existence? Does the squirrel need to be there when he looks down for it to be true there might be a hungry squirrel present?
Or perhaps, to put this back into the earlier context of knowing events, how does he know there isn't a squirrel in the yard? Even if he thinks so and sees no squirrel, he can't eliminate the possibility he might be wrong. Maybe he just missed a squirrel which was there. Our observation is only good insofar as the world we observe. The truth of this possibility doesn't change if he happens to be right and there is no squirrel.
Seems to me that it's always possible there is a squirrel in the yard, even when one isn't there. All squirrels, both real and imagined (the squirrel that might be there is suggested in the world he experiences), are bound in relation to him and the world he encounters. Even a giant prehistoric squirrel eating gargantuan acorns, whether only imagined or not, is bound to his world of experience. And he to the world of the squirrel, for he sees or thinks the acorns that any real or imagined squirrel is hungry for.
Take what you will or want to. I'll return to silence now.
None of these claims, so far as I can see, is incompatible with what I said. That there is the possibility of a squirrel eating an acorn doesn't mean there is one, or that an observer has to know there are actually such creatures.
Quoting csalisbury
Actually, the existence of acorn-eating beings is causally tied up with the existence of acorns in important ways. But no, it's not a logical necessity that the existence of x should entail the existence of a sort of creature that eats x. There are ways of interacting with objects, that are still projections of willing, besides eating them. Bright colors warn of poison, and so on. One of the things that acorns project is their edibility for certain constitutions, one of which is a squirrel's. A squirrel doesn't have to see acorns or even be aware of their existence to eat them at all -- to them it might just all be a blur of sensations. We in turn, having more complex mechanisms, view their scramble to satisfy their desires in a certain objective way, with the intersection between their hunger and its satisfaction looking, to us, like an animal consuming a certain kind of object.
Quoting csalisbury
There's no need for an observer -- it's not as if people looking at things 'keeps them in existence,' and I never meant to imply anything like that. There's nothing wrong with the example, it just doesn't show what you think it does unless you beg the question by assuming that first of all we can assume that things 'just exist,' and then afterwards other things just come along and bump into them. If this realist picture isn't assumed from the outset, I don't understand what the example is intended to show.
I think you are seeing my position as something like: things are pretty much like the realist says, except that the desires of organisms somehow are a generative mechanism that causes them to pop into existence. Or else I can't make sense of why this would be a criticism, anyway. But the conceptual reversal is a little less trivial and a little less crazy than that. It's more that we live in a swirl of sufferings and pains and so on, and they crystallize into the appearance of a world, which is itself just a kind of objectification of how we expect, or try to make, those various desires behave (often unsuccessfully). So because I encounter resistance to movement, I take there to be solid things; but this doesn't mean that the objections to my will that solid things embody depends on my thinking about them or watching them or wanting them or anything. If I didn't have the perceptual or intellectual powers to make such a move to seeing solid things, I'd keep having my desires frustrated in the form of not moving where I wanted to, without having any recourse to fixing it or understanding it. To come to understand how to move properly is to come to see solid objects, which is itself a way of understanding how my desires function: so complexes of perceptions guide me as to how I can not hurt myself or have my movement impeded.
But those oppositions to my desires -- like the squirrel dying because it was left on the wrong side of the courtyard -- impede me regardless of whether I want them to or not. Our observer watching one squirrel die is seeing those desires getting frustrated, which to the squirrel involve nothing of courtyards or acorns or anything, but to the observer have that character, because he sees the squirrel's struggle in terms of how it impinges on his own sufferings.
Quoting csalisbury
Yes, because eating things is not the only way we interact with them. The acorns would appear to him e.g. solid, so he could probably surmise, even before touching them, that his hands would not pass through them, as light by their size, so he could surmise that he could probably pick them up as long as they weren't bizarrely dense, and so on. These too are projections bearing on his sufferings, the way hew could interact and manipulate them by doing certain things involving this projection. Once he eats one himself (maybe that would be a little hard), or sees a squirrel doing so, he will come to associate these other qualities he already experiences with edibility by squirrels, and so now the sensory clues that acorns provide would also provide a clue to a certain kind of edibility. But the fact that being in that vicinity would allow the squirrel not to go hungry doesn't depend on him realizing this. It's the other way around -- there being a certain way in which his, and other feeling creatures, feelings are impacted causes the projection to take on a new associated quality.
---
One thing that might be causing confusion is that when I talk about these things I usually speak charitably of ordinary objects and so on, because it's hard to talk otherwise without tying yourself into knots, but I don't really think we perceive objects at all, that is, there's no such thing as perception in the classical sense, something that reaches out to what's beyond it at the other end and terminates in something independent of it.
Could you provide an example of previously unrelated objects coming into relation? I think the contrast would help me understand the point you're trying to make here. I'd even grant you that the dude needs to know hunger to recognize hungry beings.)
Allow me to be a bit bold and say I think I understand your position better than you think I do. I attempted to stave off a laborious demonstration of this understanding through some shorthand hints, but they don't appear to have taken.
So, quickly: The relation between subject and world is not one of creator and created or constituter and constituted. Rather both subject and world are poles of a chiasmic working-through of desire (will, hunger). The world as human adults spontaneously think of it -as comprised of independent objects which appear to have distinct identities, where events unfold according to the PSR - is actually a late development, a product of our intelligence, which is inseparable from our desires, since the satisfaction of these desires is precisely what explains this intelligence's development. In a 'ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny' kinda way, we can observe that the human infant begins life as a 'blooming, buzzing, confusion' of drives and only gradually develops object permanence, the ability to separate itself from the world etc.
y/n?
For the sake of this argument, I'm granting you all of the above.
Let's begin again. I'm going to ask literally the same question. Answer as succinctly as possible. The two squirrels, having been thrown (wink, wink) by the sadistic boy, land on two separate sides of the courtyard. One side has acorns. The other side does not. Which squirrel suffers and why? Remember: Stating that squirrels in general suffer because they are hungry or that hungry beings in general suffer because they are deprived of food is not a sufficient answer to this question. (Q: Why did the fireworks ignite? A. Because fireworks are ignitable)
The hikikomori's answer: the squirrel that happened to land on the left side suffered because the tree was on the right side. Is this a correct answer, provided one has implicitly granted all the qualifications and explanations granted above?
That's fine. But then, I'm not sure of the hikkimori's relevance.
Quoting csalisbury
Sure. I think if I were in 'esoteric mode,' or had a few drinks, I'd be willing to say the world doesn't form a pole at all, but in fact there is no world -- what's to be explained is the philosopher's conviction that there is one (in either the materialist or Heideggerian sense). The subject as pole is very classical transcendeal idealist, and surely Schop. himself likes that wording. But it seems to me to bring about the notion of subject as 'world-bearer,' which I'd say is wrong in that it doesn't act as a transcendental condition, and of corse there is no world to bear. My preferred notion of 'subject' focuses more on 'being subjected to things.' Being a subject is being beaten up essentially.
Quoting csalisbury
I think that's a fine answer. What I don't understand is what it's supposed to show. After all, say you were a radical phenomenalist -- you could grant the same thing, but then analyze the existence of the acorns, etc. as dispositions to experience, and everything would come out fine (at least, without further argument). I'm wary of ordinary language conclusions being proffered for metaphysically substantive points.
Edit: oh you're suggesting experiences like this are better thought of in terms of concord/conflict? I think I agree? I think a long history of being painfully hungry is what leads people to portray being as an agony driven by an essential lack. That and/or revulsion at any sort of dependence. Hunger is actually a very nice thing if you've easy and continued access to good brunch spots.Some flavors complement, some clash. Need for affection tortures the lonely and enlivens those surrounded with a good crew. The poor are far more occupied with the struggle for money than the rich.The rich can focus on arranging a harmonious life. (So there are obvious ethical considerations here. Affirm at the risk of ignoring the plight of the deeply suffering - as well as one own's capacity for similar pain. But there are two ways to look at it. Mother Theresa was totally on board with-the-world-as-suffering view and not only surrounded herself with the suffering but often denied them ways of easing that suffering. This is empathy not for people but for proofs. Many pessimistic philosophers do the same with ideas about the suffering imo)
Sure, but such an explanation is only going to be a worthwhile one if you're a human. The way you've put it makes it seem like the humans' special privilege in viewing this scene is the result of having a kind of superior access to the acorns and trees that the squirrels lack, whereas I'm suggesting that the projection of these things is the result of a superior (read instrumentally) set of powers that project themselves as visions of trees and acorns and so on. In the end, though, these ar ejust visions, if you like. There is no object at the end of vision.
Yeah, the gods left us behind, and we could leave squirrels behind, in the sense that we could form an entire maze for them that they will never have the slightest understanding of. Many species of animals live their entire lives trapped in such mazes of willing, in factory farms, raised for the explicit purpose of being eaten by beings they can't begin to comprehend. To them, their pains might just appear as 'the way things are.' But we know better -- we know that they're kept alive, and kept in bondage, by a kind of cosmic conspiracy.
In my view both the squirrels and the peopl share a world except the people's world comprehends the squirrel's and not vice versa. Let me clarify that. The people can see, if they like, exactly why some squirrels fail and some don't. They can't know what it's like to be drawn to junping toward this branch and not another
This is still confusing to me. Classical psychological projection makes already-existing others bearers of the feelings we can't deal with harboring ourselves. A stuffed animal - any 'transitional object - exists prior to a child's projections. The very syntax of 'we project our desires onto something else' suggests a subject and an object upon which the subject can unburden its agonies. "there is no animal or creature 'there.'" Except, of course, that there is. The stuffed animal doesn't, in itself, contain those things we project upon it. But, for some reason, having a static object really helps us organize us those confused feelings.
Projection needs something pre-existent to project onto. That's the sine qua non of projection.
And what projects is the source of the projection. It's what accounts for the projection. This seems diametrically opposed to the idea of world and self as co-constituting, which you've nominally espoused.
When you speak more theoretically and less metaphorically, I get some inkling of what you're talking about. But your metaphors sit uneasily with your theory, and I think theoretical ideas tend to be less representative of a person's actual convictions that the metaphors they spontaneously mobilize.
I would say that in psychological projection we see others that aren't there. We think we're seeing someone else, but we don't engage with them in any sense -- they might as well not be there at all. There is no 'real person,' only a fantasy of what that person should be, a reflection of one's own frustrations.
Quoting csalisbury
All metaphors give out somewhere. There's a disanalogy in that of course I'm saying the cotton facsimile of a creature is itself not 'there' either. But the important thing to see is that the animal is not there on the terms the child thinks it is. That is, there is no animal at all. Likewise, the world purports to be something 'there' - but it isn't. Is there 'something' there? Maybe, but it is not what it is supposed to be, doesn't live up to its own terms.
Quoting csalisbury
The world and self are not co-constituting because there is no world to constitute. If we have our prisoners in the cave, and they ask us what the origin of all the objects they're seeing are, we can answer either by saying that they come from reflections of the light behind them -- or we can answer by saying, they don't come from anywhere because you aren't seeing any objects to begin with.
How exactly is there to be a monster interested in eating the ashes of a grandmother without any link to a person with grand children? It would be to miss the relevant meaning entirely. As if, in trying to imagine a monster interested in eating the ashes of grandmothers, we denied the monster could have any interest in eating the ashes of grandmothers.
That latter answer doesn't seem very good to me.
Q What's the origin of that island?
A: That island doesn't come from anywhere because you aren't seeing any island to begin with. It's a mirage.
Obvious next Q: Huh, what's the origin of the mirage?
So the former answer, in your example, is a much better one. But I still don't really understand how you conceptualize 'the light behind.' You can call it the desire/hunger/will/agony of the subject projected outward. But when pressed on how that works, you're quick to clarify that it's not as though there's some subject who creates a world if out there, which it 'bears'. " it doesn't act as a transcendental condition." Except that's exactly how you describe it. The sleight-of-hand is to say that there are 'illusions' not 'objects.' But then the subject becomes precisely a transcendental bearer of a world of 'illusions.' What I'm trying to say is the inconsistencies and failures of analogies aren't all that innocent. You use different language and imagery depending on the questions asked - and it doesn't line up. I'm not sure you're quite clear on what you're suggesting. Your position appears to be basically the-material-world-is-maya, which you elaborate using concepts and imagery from elsewhere (Schop, Husserl, Henry probably introspection). But I don't think you really have an idea of how that works.
Some questions:
What is the relation between the acorn-projection of the squirrel and the acorn-projection of the man?
Why do kids need transitional objects given by parents? why don't they just project their frustrations as objects on their own?
Isn't this a line from Jimmy Carter's inauguration speech? plz don't plagiarize.
Your objection here, is my same objection with any philosophy trying to explain the dualism of mental and physical.
Person 1: Where is the mental aspect?
Person 2; Oh silly human, it is an "illusion"
Person 1: What is the illusion, if not something "other" than the physical, thus creating a virtual dualism of "illusion" and "physical" rather than "mental" and "physical". Effectively it is the same thing. The illusion now has to be explained.
Yes, I agree. He is a good example of someone who thinks that by claiming it to be an "illusion", that this makes the solution go away. However, the illusion is still "something" that needs explaining. There is still a mysterious illusion. It is now relabeled physical/illusion rather than physical/mental.
I am not sure how much it applies in this case but, I guess it would be Will/Illusion versus Physical/Illusion. Or Will/Mentally Objectified objects versus Physical/Mental. There is a dualism none the less. Again, I think Schop combined with panpsychism could be an interesting solution. If all is mental, all the way down, then Will/mental is the flip side of all that is physical. There is still the mystery of how mental is physical is mental is physical is mental is physical I guess.
Another thing to be explained is how time/space/causality/PSR fits into Schop's model at all. If all is Will, then what the heck is the PSR in relation to Will and where does it come from? If Will is a monistic framework which all fits into, then where does this PSR manifest that seems to be a portal for which the Will becomes objectified in a representational world? There is always something that needs to be explained outside the monism to get the seemingly dualistic world we seem to experience which then introduces something outside of "x" or this all encompassing, monistic Will.
This enters into mythopoetic or religious territory. I take it to be roughly the Kingdom of God in the Gnostic tradition.
Quoting csalisbury
Not at all. Some philosophical prejudice may lead you to believe that's what's required, but there's no necessity to it. I think you're engaging in some weird wordplay here, acting as if an 'illusion' is some separate sort of substantial thing that also needs ontological explication (or else your criticism of Dennett makes no sense). Rather, an illusion is nothing, in the sense that what one takes to be 'there' by some criteria is not, on those very criteria. There's no other thing, the illusion, that is now there instead. If you like, an illusion is just the very act of falling for it -- it's not as if I thought I was perceiving one thing, an object, but rather I was perceiving another, an illusion. Rather, the illusion is itself that there is an object.
If you like, to be under an illusion or delusion is to be involved in this kind of unhealthy, unhappy, or self-defeating conviction or practice.
A legitimate question might then be, 'why do I engage in these unhappy and self-defeating convictions? Why am I under an illusion?' That's a very complex question, and I think it can only be answered, like with good psychotherapy, by unweaving the illusion itself and seeing its source on its own terms. Is there a surefire way to do this? I don't know: I think some people are probably more constitutionally prone to or capable of it than others. But philosophy and religion can help, in babysteps. The proof is always in the pudding. In saying these things I don't so much see myself as defending some thesis to you, but rather explicating something that I live with and 'understand' in the way that I understand how to walk or what it's like to be alive. It's these sorts of lived practices that are deeper ingrained than debate that religion attends to.
Though of course, we engage in philosophy too because it unweaves sophisms on their own terms. And I do think there is some Western philosophy that is rationally helpful at this juncture, and that includes in particular the Cyrenaics, Schopenhauer, and Henry. The way in which the frustrations 'become' an object has to be seen -- but it can be seen because it's happening to you all the time. It's like realizing that you're upside down.
What is the relation between the acorn-projection of the squirrel and the acorn-projection of the man? (If the hypostatization bothers you, then call it the acorn-ing of the squirell's there and the acorning of the man's there.)
Why do kids need transitional objects given by parents? why don't they just project their frustrations as objects on their own?
Yes, and there are some thinkers in the Western traditions that describe this process. The most complete account is found in Henry's Essence of Manifestation, which is unfortunately practically impenetrable.
I see this not ultimately as a kind of generation of objects, but as a kind of spiritual-psychological engrossment in a certain way of thinking, as alienated form oneself, and trying to place one's own pathe outside.
Quoting csalisbury
A squirrel, presumably, does not project acorns at all.
Quoting csalisbury
Because, again, projection isn't a kind of generative power, nor is there an omnipotent self. That there are certain objects is already a reflection of the way these projections work themselves out.
As to the squirrel. Well, maybe it doesn't project an acorn per se. That's probably true. Regardless, our projected/illusory world is shared. The man can pick up and move the acorn and it'll fuck up the squirrel's shit. Interaction with - and through - each others 'projections' is possible.
The accumulated 'projections' exceed the particular desires of individuals to such an extent - well, it's almost like an ant colony. Any particular ant is mindlessly following pheremone trails. Viewed in the light of the whole, though, it's helping to build a nest, although no individual ant has any idea of the process its taking part in. There's a kind of objectivity build out of the blindness of individual subjectivities pursuing their own ends.
I still don't get what you mean by projection. If it isn't a 'generative' power, why call it 'projection' at all? To project is to be the cause of what's projected. What qualities of projections, literal or psychological, do you see in the process you're trying to describe? You talked about objects (object-ing) being like psychological projection, resulting from our trying to externalize our inner agony. Except now you're saying that no individual can actually do that? Do the subjects merely watch an Other's projections, projections of the kingdom of god, projections which so entrance, that the subjects can't help but subconsciously affirm the show? But then why did you being up individual psychological projection before? I'm not being cute, I really don't understand how 'projection' is being put to work here.
So, the teddy bear - the infant projects but it doesn't project this object, exactly, because this object reflects how other projections are already at work?
Q: Why do infants, empirically, need a static object to project onto?
A: Well, those 'objects' are already the results of prior projections.
Q: Why does the infant need the static result of prior projections to project onto?
But if you admit the squirrel projects no acorn, then this way of putting it is infelicitous. We don't tamper with the squirrel's projection by moving an acorn. We tamper with the squirrel, sure. But the acorn is a kind of human heuristic, not a shared one.
I agree there is a shared space in the sense that we are capable of coercing each other.
Quoting csalisbury
That's true, but I don't know if I'd call it objectivity, which has certain overtones, like being an object for a subject, recognizable as something reachable at the far end of perception of an intellect. The extent to which it's objective is the extent to which we have no control over it.
Quoting csalisbury
When you project your unpleasant qualities onto another person, do you create a person with those qualities? Do you create anything? It would seem no. Same thing with the stuffed animal.
Quoting csalisbury
They don't. They (children, maybe not infants) can create imaginary friends. Personal deities or spirits probably also have served a similar function at many points.
Quoting csalisbury
Although they don't, it can help -- after all, these projections are not actually things like the person takes them to be, but complexes of pathe (including the feel or need for them to be 'outer'), and feeling a certain way can engender feeling another way.
In my experience those practices or convictions which lead most to unhealthy, unhappy or self-defeating modes of existence are those that hamper one's ability to connect to others. You often cite fear of the inner by creating an outer. I think it's just as easy to be scared of the outer.
(1)Believing too firmly in the absoluteness of things can both keep at bay the outer and others. Whether one cites the One, God or Nature, the idea persists that there is some higher power which keeps everything in its place. This externalization of meaning and creative power makes actual intimacy difficult.
(2) But intelligent people start to see the cracks. (Or rather intelligent, disappointed people do.) But how does this play out? There's the old-testament prophetic route, where one gets obsessed with the eventual destruction of the cities, like a man who knows the bridge is compromised and awaits the train that will bring it down, like the trumpet that will bring down Jericho. In social-intimate terms, this is definitely alienating. But there's also the possibility of salvaging a crackless inside by riding the via negativa to another place. The cracks are thereby prevented from letting the outside in because. The 'world' turns out not to live up to the ideal we thought it did, so one discards it, instead of discarding the ideal.
(3) Accept that things are fragile and that we create them together. Interesting avenues of exploration: Attachment theory, the psycho-genesis of cities and villages, the mutation of myths and religions (which Sloterdjik rightly calls technologies of immunity) etc.
I doubt it. I think the extent to which the world is shared is exaggerated, and it's done so in part because we're free to project our own way of seeing things onto everyone else, and people basically live like solipsists, believing everyone to see things as they do, and responding to apparent disparities with frustration, violence, denial, accusations of moral or intellectual deficiency, etc.
I'm attracted to the idea that there need be no top-down organization in order for a mechanism to work: there doesn't have to be a unifying condition to make the world 'function,' just as nobody commands oceans or planets or marketplaces. It's possible for an interaction to emerge (that among humans mostly takes the form of coercion) from bits and pieces that do not see each other and don't have much to do with each other on their own terms. Order is always forced to arise out of accidents, but that order is also not that powerful.
There's a linguistic metaphor for this that I'm fond of, which is that in American English there's actually no common articulation for 'r'. Rather, individual speakers have a wide variety of private articulations, yet nonetheless that /r/ phoneme enters the public language because all of these converge on a single psychological sound-cateogry despite the differences in articulation. The naive philosopher is like someone who demands that because the sound has a certain role, obviously it must have some common or shared source. But this is just not true. Whatever 'works,' works (or doesn't). The naive philosopher has it backwards. And without linguistic research, we would have gone on being forever unaware that we weren't even mouthing the same thing -- we had beetles in our mouths.
Quoting csalisbury
Maybe, but I don't think other people are 'outer' in quite the way the realist would have it.
Quoting csalisbury
I don't really deal in 'solutions' or 'ways forward' because I think it's pointless. Life isn't some puzzle with a best way of living it, and it doesn't really have any questions that it asks and need to be answered. It's really not my concern what you decide to take on board as a result of these musings. I don't think what an individual person decides to do or believe matters much.
The blob is the mess of pathe (though you can never really visually represent these things instead of living them). It shifts and turns and takes many shapes. Among the shapes it takes are the shape of a face and a tree, stand-ins for one's self identity as subject and for the external world. Both grown out of the same pathetic source, and both are in fact never separated from it; they are simply the feelings coagulating into a certain shape or quality. The philosopher zooms in on their interaction as if with a little box, and sees them as standing separately and coming into contact, ignoring the existence of pathe altogether (and insisting that their reintroduction is a kind of 'dualism' or 'supernaturalism' outside the sphere of the one world -- ontological monism). Life as lived includes not just what is outside of the philosopher's box, but also what is in it, and it is those shapes -- the projection of the tree is made up of colors and lights and tickling on the skin and all these very familiar sensations and neuroses.
The philosophical desire is one to externalize by pretending that there are no pathe, just the box. Of course, you can't really do this -- they've never been separated from the feeling to begin with, but are only playing at it.
Note that the whole blob, including the face and tree, are not a sort of universal pathos-ether, either -- this is all just one person, if you like. The mask and the tree get held up in opposition though they are both actually 'the same' thing, placed opposite one another, one projected away from the other (even though in fact there is no separation). Obsession with this structure comes from being unable to bear oneself and a demand for escape. Notice that the projection is then only a manifestation of these feelings, but that there is nothing, no center, in control of them or choosing what to form where. And an object is never actually successfully created -- and there is no other third thing, 'the illusion,' to be explained.
To take just one example: you stated admantly that pathe do *not* generate objects. & now, in your language, both identity and the world 'grow out' out of the pathe. When I try to ask pertinent questions, you immediately split semantic hairs. But if I try to meet you on that plain, I learn quickly that these are just metaphors and ways of talking that give out eventually.
Let me a bit cheeky and say that this reminds me a lot of how realists talk about the 'real world' when confronted with its limitations.
I also think you might think I'm trying to reinstate a naive idea of the cosmos as already-there. I'm not. I'm with you half the way. Your model strikes me as kind of island of the lotus eaters. A pleasant stop that denies anything outside of it and offers a promise of release (here you might say no no no the pathe are agonizing brute facts whether there's world or not. But the kingdom of god is always just offstage). If I argue vehemently against you, it's because I'm arguing also against the part of me that wants to deny in order to salvage the elsewhere. How's that for solipsism
John 3:8:
"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."
I have ideas about this, but they're very difficult to put into words. I don't know if I've ever talked to you about the blind fountain, but that is the idea I'm focused on developing. There is an 'explanation,' but it's not of the sort that most would be willing to accept, and it goes along with a kind of epistemic humility, even isolation and loneliness.
On the one hand, I don't think it's a shortcoming of an account to say 'I don't know how it works' if that is the correct thing to say. The purpose of good epistemology is not to make up stories about what we know, but to give an accurate account of what and how we know. There are some points on which I think a skepticism or even a negative dogmatism in the vein of the Cyrenaics is in order. But that doesn't mean we just don't talk about it. It's important to enrich and flesh out these new metaphors.
Quoting csalisbury
Well if your questions are allowed to be naif why can't my answers be? I can only give back what I get. If you have things you really want to ask, really ask them then.
Quoting csalisbury
Does the picture not make that intelligible?
Think of it like the cave, again. There are two ways to answer 'where does the urn I see come from?' You can play along and say it comes from the light behind, or you can say 'let me stop you there, because there's no urn.' I don't see any tension in speaking in these two ways, just different registers. If you want me to go permanently into the 'esoteric' register (the exoteric/esoteric split is a big part of Christianity) I can do that, but then you have to be charitable and not give commonsense objections like 'so what, there's no acorns? do you really believe that?' and so on.
[quote=tgw] I don't think it's a shortcoming of an account to say 'I don't know how it works' if that is the correct thing to say. The purpose of good epistemology is not to make up stories about what we know, but to give an accurate account of what and how we know [...] But that doesn't mean we just don't talk about it. It's important to enrich and flesh out these new metaphors.[/quote]
I agree. I also think it's good to hypothesize and say 'maybe it's like this' and then see how well the hypothesis stands up to scrutiny. But I sometimes feel like you take the more severe approach of suggesting not only that you don't know, but that we can't, in principle know - and that it any case it doesn't matter.
[quote=tgw]Well if your questions are allowed to be naif why can't my answers be? I can only give back what I get. If you have things you really want to ask, really ask them then.[/quote]
I suppose that's fair. I thought it would be better to try to work things out according to the immanent logic of your account, because you tend to be immediately dismissive of anything else.
no no no, of course the picture makes it intelligible. It was intelligible before the picture. What I'm objecting to is what appears to me a reluctance to apply your model to concrete examples in good faith by arbitrarily precluding certain language and metaphors that you yourself have recourse to.
What's the blind fountain?
I do, this is the ancient opposition between skepticism, which suspends belief regarding a possibility, and negative dogmatism, which pronounces negatively on a possibility. I'm not a skeptic, I think there are things we know, and other things I'm willing to pronounce aren't known or knowable.
Quoting csalisbury
I barely ever talk about this stuff, and not to anyone I know. I have philosophical fatigue. Important things can't be shared anyway, and philosophy at this level has no rigor, and is just a bunch of arguments from incredulity and mythologizing. I'd mostly rather practice than argue, which is why religion starts to be more interesting.
When there is a criticism that attempts to engage with the position itself (which is the only kind of criticism there is in my view -- all criticism is internal), I try to go with it, but I'm having trouble seeing the problems.
Quoting csalisbury
Well, I think the metaphors can be dropped once you get it. Once you see, it's not like you need to keep rehearsing the metaphors in your head. Work in metaphor happens on the frontier of your understanding -- I don't have metaphors for water and people, they're just part of my life, and every metaphor happens in terms of something I don't have a metaphor for.
If the tension in the metaphors bothers you, you can replace the 'object' that 'grows' with 'purported object' or 'projection' (as in, a projection on a screen of an image, which insofar as one takes it to be a thing other than such an image is not what it purports to be). But talking that way all the time gets tiring.
Quoting csalisbury
The blind fountain is the closest thing I entertain to a metaphysical model of the universe. The basic idea is that all action is coercive, so that we're all solely passive with respect to ourselves (we have no control, except indirectly through coercion of others), but solely active with respect to others (we do not feel what they feel, their 'passions'). So there is no 'world' in that things are fundamentally split with respect to the active/passive distinction, and there is no place in which all these things come together. Everyone/thing is simultaneously completely alone and utterly dependent on an unknown 'outside.' The condition of our being 'together' is the condition of our being 'alone.' So there is no source of things, no transcendental root or laws, just endless fractured coercion, with everything being a 'source' with respect to everything else, and no common arena in which it all takes place. This allows for the possibility of genuine novelty and the ultimate impotence of all explanation.
I also think the structure effectively acts to perpetually exacerbate and propagate endless suffering, but that's more of a religious flourish.
I like the 'blind fountain' concept. It reminds me a lot of Deleuze's 'rhizome'
[quote=Deleuze] A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles[...] A rhizome has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature[...] Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first: "Call the strings or rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that its multiplicity resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into the text. Granted; but the actor’s nerve fibers in turn form a weave. And they fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated [...]The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else-with the wind, an animal, human beings[...]a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure[...]A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo[...]The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, "and . . . and . . . and. . ."[...]American literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics. The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.- A Thousand Plateaus [/quote]
I do think that you can do away with a 'common arena' but still have 'connection.' I think back to my improv days or of my yearly xmas gathering with friends, where we go to a rural camp and drink and 'shoot the shit' and everyone kind of syncs to a rhythm of joking and telling stories. Jam sessions or Jazz. In these settings each person's contribution becomes a source for someone else's -and all according to an immanently generated rhythm.
I don't think we're born alone. Or at least - we're born always looking toward someone else. Usually Mom takes the role. It's true that there may be no one to fill the role. But then the baby dies. Importantly, this is not just about being burped or getting fed. Infants need a kind of subjective source of affection - they need to mother's face, mirroring etc. Being able to be alone comes much later, if we survive infancy. And even then the way we're alone always involves someone else.
Anyway, this is what I was getting at with the 'transitional object.' The model as presented in your picture is utterly solipsistic. But the actual human infant depends on the pre-existing projections of someone else in order to themselves project. And so forth all the way down.
People are more or less born solipsists, and have to develop a theory of mind -- I'm not sure that an infant is ever 'looking toward someone else' in anything more than the banal sense that it needs someone else to take care of it, or in the sense that as soon as it's born it's already maturating toward the development of a theory of mind. As autism becomes increasingly severe, you can see what it looks like to remain more and more in that solipsistic state, and never to get a grasp on the theory of mind.
The idea that we're all alone in the end I take to be one of the major competing literary outlooks on life that's been around probably as long as people have, not something radical or new. The realization of one's loneliness and the unsatisfactoriness of other people is a major driving force in literature & mythology, and some modern Western takes on it can be found as sub-themes in e.g. Heart of Darkness or The Awakening. I mention all this just as a point of reference to where I'm coming from -- I see this as a kind of informal existential tradition (that Schop. would surely fit into).
Quoting csalisbury
As I said, the model just reflects one person. And that person doesn't suffer the 'outside,' because they're only passive w.r.t. themselves. They can coerce other people, but can't feel them. I think the feeling of other people being there is a kind of halfway state, where your coercive actions receive enough passive feedback that you get a kind of pleasant loop going, and that's person-to-person interaction (mutual coercion). The pleasure of being around someone else is the pleasure of something being alien enough that it can coerce you, but not so alien that it can't respond to your coercive tendencies in ways you can reciprocate. But all that doesn't mean you get free of the 'ultimate' loneliness, which isn't a coherent thing to ask for -- to assimilate the other person entirely would just be to talk to yourself again, which isn't what you want, and so you have to be alone in order for there to be 'other' people, contra the naive realist who sees other people as things like rocks that you directly see (and so everything is 'public').
I agree there is a dependence there, even a radical dependence, and we're utterly passive with respect to our own creation (we're creatures, ens creata in the Christian sense). The fallacy I see with traditional notions of this dependence is that it assumes this dependence requires some kind of meaningful connection or shared world. On the contrary, it's what makes everyone alone. And trying to bridge that gap by being around other people is seductive, but ultimately always unsatisfying, like everything else in life.
That Deleuze quote is hard to understand. All I'd say is the notion of 'outside' I mean isn't really comparable to a plant's nourishment being physically outside of it. 'Between' also makes me uncomfortable, because it seems to propose a single space.
And quickly, regarding Deleuze, I think its important to extend the same charity to the metaphors of others that we extend to our own. Deleuze explicitly addresses your concern about space. I agree that the Deleuze quote is hard to understand, it's got something of the avant garde manifesto about it. But I think he's saying a lot of the same things you are. And he's probably saying some things you're not, and you're probably saying some things he isn't. But, then, that's what it's like reading or talking to anyone, even those whom you have a lot in common with.
And I certainly don't mean to suggest that we get to escape the 'ultimate loneliness,' only to suggest that the pain of that ultimate loneliness derives from a memory of connection, and that the experience of it usually involves others. Cioran & Thoreau write for the public, the anchorite looks to God, you post here etc.
Probably not. Babies (even newborns, even hours-old newborns) seem to need (expressive) faces. I think that suggests the baby needs something they experience as an emotional source, a bestower, not just a touch or soundwaves. I think you can have a sense of a source without quite having a theory of mind.
So, then I guess the question would be whether you could maturate a child appropriately in a simulacrum of appropriate heat, sound, and faciality. Maybe with really sophisticated technology and a lot of research? (My hunch is it would take a lot of work to learn all the nuances babies are aware of, just as we're only recently begun to understand the nuances of how the infant appreciaties the maternal face)But, I think that, even in this case, it would remain a (very primitive) I-thou relationship. Or, perhaps more accurately a [jumble of pain/pleasure/hunger/fear/love/]-thou relationship. In a similar vein, the 'test' of a turning test is precisely whether it gives you the sense of someone 'there.'
Right, but my sense is that this model begins to disintegrate as soon as you try to try to apply it to intersubjective situations, especially cooperative ones. So, for instance, could you give a sketch of how to extend your model to account for a professional basketball game (two teams playing and an audience)?
But experiencing something as an emotional source isn't the same as it being one. Put another way -- do you think all babies that grow up without being loved are developmentally disabled? Perhaps it makes life harder not to be loved from an early age, but this strikes me as an implausibly strong claim.
Quoting csalisbury
The Turing test has already been passed by simulated psychologists that basically just ask back what you say to them. If that's all you need for the presence of someone being 'there,' then it's quite weak in the sense that it doesn't really require anyone being there. I think for the most part people live as practical solipsists in day to day life, and only attribute to others the bare minimum they need to interact with them, while in some sense being convinced they're the only real people. Or at least that's what their actions seem to suggest most of the time. The rest is taken care of by powerful psychological projection, and genuine sonder is a bit rarer (maybe it occurs with family members and close friends).
Quoting csalisbury
Again there's a question of whether you need a common model to show how interactions work. For example, does a symbiotic creature act any differently from a lone one? Probably not -- most have no idea that they interact with another organism or depend on it for survival at all, yet the symbiotic relationship works just fine. There is no transcendental 'glue' holding these things together. It's not that it works because of some commonality, but rather that on observation we see a commonality because it works.
Actually, yes. There's a famous study by Rene Spitz, following infants raised in orphanages, who had their basic needs met, but had minimal human contact. Nearly all of them were severely developmentally disabled.
By practical solipsists, then, you mean people who neither think about the vast complexity and deep humanity nor form deep connections with the people they interact with in passing?
It seems to me that an organism that has no idea its interacting with other organisms is a poor metaphor for what goes on in a basketball game. But that's fine if there's no 'transcendental glue' holding everything together. I'm not asking you which ways of thinking about a basketball game are bad. I'm asking you to provide your own account
That's interesting. It raises the question of what would happen if the relevant proxies for actual contact were introduced.
Quoting csalisbury
Sure -- one way to think about it is that people's behavior wouldn't change that much if everyone in the background were replaced with robots that just passed by. There are a select few people that for any intent or purpose people endow with 'full humanity' on a daily basis, and even then seemingly not as much as they do for themselves. It's simply not relevant for affected action most of the time that other people are people rather than fixtures of the physical world like the sidewalk. The vast majority of person-person relations pass each other by totally unnoticed.
I also think that a large amount of people do not have anyone they treat as fully human, either due to psychological inability or resistance to it, or from simple lack of human contact or genuine relationships.
Quoting csalisbury
Is it though? Have you played online games? There's another human coordinating with you on the other end opponent or teammate, but without voice chat or someone sitting next to you it feels very little like a 'human presence,' and in advanced games it's hard to tell whether you're fighting an AI or a person absent this. I play a few fighting games and am familiar with the phenomenology -- I imagine something similar happens in FPSes and RTSes. Basketball games are different in that there are human bodies running around, maybe -- but that's just because body-robots are harder to make than fighting-game input robots. People display more 'quirks' and make more humanlike 'errors' in fighting games, and have a noticeable propensity for very top-level strategizing (and wild shifts in strategy) that computers generally don't in these games. But in many games, these differences just do not show through, and even as someone who plays a certain game a lot, in many instances I wouldn't be able to tell if I was playing another person or a very good AI.
I'm not sure how interesting it is that you could replace people in the crowd with robots and no one would notice. I'd notice if you replaced my coworkers, my bartender, my family, my friends, my barber etc. etc. Am I exquisitely attuned to the depths of any of those besides some friends and family? Not really. I think there's a substantial difference between that and practical solipsism. This is a move you make a lot. Either people are super-empaths deeply emotionally attuned to the plumbless depths of everyone or they're practical solipsists. Psychoanalysts call this way of thinking "splitting."
I don't understand the point you're trying to make about RTS AIs being hard to distinguish from human players. I'm asking you to explain, using your blob-model, how a basketball game works, which you still haven't done.
I think getting through the day doesn't really require treating other people with anything close to the humanity people are forced to grant themselves, and for the most part people don't do it.
Just to give a simple example, when people criticize their political opponents, they literally show an inability to attribute to them the intelligence, internal life, and human faculties that they attribute to themselves. The same goes for simple interactions on the street -- people have a kind of chronic inability to see someone who bumps into them as having the same fault as they do when they bump into someone else. I don't think I've made any ridiculous binary splits like you suggest. This is a perfectly ordinary observation.
Quoting csalisbury
I don't really understand what you think needs explaining. There are a lot of levels at which you could describe a basketball game. Honestly, I don't even know all of the rules of basketball, so I would be bad at explaining it generally.
Well, you made the claim that basically everyone is a practical solipsist almost all of the time. I don't see the demonization and dehumanization of one's enemies (which is a sad thing but something different) or reacting irrationally to getting bumped into on the sidewalk as particularly compelling evidence for pervasive practical solipsism, but maybe we're just tuned to different frequencies.
Yeah, basketball, like many sports, can get byzantine, so let's suppose a simplified version. You work with your teammates to throw a basketball into a hoop and against the other team to make sure they don't the same.
I can understand your blob model when imagining people doing things on their own. In a basketball game, it seems very clear to me that it's necessary at every moment for the participants' projections to be in sync in very specific ways. And the projections of the audience, who can't foresee the course of the game in advance, seem entirely reliant on the projections of the basketball players, who, along with the ball are the game.
People's projections all seem incredibly tied to each other's in this case. For the players to play, they have to be in sync. For the audience to watch and understand, they all have to project something similar (they can talk to each other about this or that play) and be constrained by the actions and projections of those playing.
I'm assuming the 'blobs' of one person, for you, don't connect to the blobs of other people. So, like, what's going on?
Nota Bene: Saying that one need not suppose a common space or a 'transcendental glue' isn't an answer, but a restriction on what the answer can be.
Don't symbiotic creatures have to be in sync? Yet they do what they do alone, without awareness of the other.
Quoting csalisbury
They affect each other and maybe they rely on each other in important ways, but that doesn't mean there's any common arena in which they meet, or that they have to realize this relationship is happening or take it to be such a relationship. You respond as you do the same way as you would if alone.
This is the point of the blind fountain, everything can be in perfect 'sync' while completely isolated (in fact, these two things go together).
How do people affect each other if the 'blobs' don't intersect? I honestly don't understand how you reconcile nothin-but-pathe with this interaction. It seems unintelligible to me.
Yes. That was the point of the AI fighting game example. All that you need is for two people to make the appropriate motions, and those motions can be triggered by private affections.
Quoting csalisbury
One coerces the other and it coerces reciprocally in turn. None of this requires awareness of what is going on with the other. An order emerges without any connection or sympathy.
I still don't understand the video game example. It seems like a weird choice, given what I know of your view. In a video game, there's a graphical interface which is identical for all players. Various players provide input through their controller or keyboard, and this input can have no have effect on the inputs of other unless these inputs are mediated by that shared interface. This is the model you want to use?
To take a very simple, concrete moment of a basketball game. One player passes the ball to his teammate. One player has to project another player passing the ball. But the player passing the ball, in his own blob, can have no effect on the projections - or blob -of the other. Or he can, through 'coercion'. But how can he 'coerce' his teammate unless his teammate projects him coercing (e.g., in this case, sees him pass the basketball?
Whether there's an interface doesn't matter. The point is that the players can coordinate on a game in such a way that they can't tell whether they are so coordinating (because they can't tell whether they're facing an AI or human). You have reactions that lead to inputs on both sides, but no real 'communication' or common space between the players that keeps this together. Just like English speakers can all articulate 'r' differently and never realize it, yet coordinate a language without having to sync up their mouths.
Quoting csalisbury
I don't know about that. I played basketball as a kid, and I never 'projected' anything when people passed to me. I more just knew how to move my body.
Quoting csalisbury
He just needs to cause certain spasms in the teammate that prompt him to move, and he can do that by moving. In practice yes human players see each other, obviously -- but what I'm saying is this is an accidental feature of a game taking place. Insofar as the whole world is a game, very little of it is kept going in this way (cooperatively & with mutual understanding).
Quoting csalisbury
Yes, but they're exceptional. I think it happens when people, instead of blindly coercing each other, so to speak, look at each other and form a kind of coercive loop where they get an increasing intimacy of feedback. Human intimacy acts as a sort of drug, I don't know if its good or bad, some people go crazy without it, and almost everyone seems to get exhausted of it after a time. There's a kind of need to bring something alien into oneself, but it can't really work. It needs to hit a sweetspot of an alien thing hovering just out of reach, close enough to form this loop and so understand and respond to it, but not so close that you're just talking to yourself again or projecting. Trying to maintain this delicate balance gives people a sort of high that temporary alleviates their more neutral state of loneliness. But it ultimately aims at something impossible and so the high has to come down, sometimes painfully. Longtime friends who give each other space would be the ideal setup.
I've felt this same way for a while. I think good marriages are this (though they're probably rare.) I've had this fantasy for a while of coming into money somehow and buying a big house and building cottages around it where all my friends (and me) can stay. Everyone has their own cottage. The house itself would be the 'public' place where people go when they want to hang out with others.
The interface doesn't matter? Can you imagine a fighting game without a graphical interface? I mean, I've gotten good enough at a few video games to understand you can reach a kind of flow where you may be totally unaware of e.g. Ryu's headband because you're so immersed in the rhythm and intricacies of the fight itself. But if the screen (and the shared graphic interface) dies, the game's over.
Yeah, as long as there's some shared experience everyone's in on and wants to talk about, the differences in 'r' articulations are lost. But the thing is that coordination requires something shared, even if its only a directedness.
Weird, I played basketball as a kid too and was always quite consciously aware of where the other players were and who had the ball etc. In terms of catching and throwing the ball, yeah, I just knew how to move my body. But that was always integrated with the conscious awareness of where others were. Maybe you were just a better basketball player than me. (Or maybe - though I hope not -this is that thing, again, where I try to use you terminology, in your sense, but all of a sudden you respond to those words as though you've never used them in special contexts)
If a basketball game can take place, one's metaphysical model has to be able to explain how that's possible, even if it's rare.
I don't think basketball games are rare, but I also don't think they're really interesting examples of intersubjectivity. You can play basketball superbly without caring much at all about your teammates as people or attributing much of an inner life to them.
If you want an account of the rarer cases, I've already started with what I said before -- about there being a kind of coercive feedback loop.
Yeah, but I'm not really looking for an account of intimacy rn. I'm still trying to understand how intersubjectivity (or inter-affectivity) works at all. This is the thread I'm really interested in -->
csal: how can he 'coerce' his teammate unless his teammate projects him coercing?
tgw: He just needs to cause certain spasms in the teammate that prompt him to move, and he can do that by moving.
I'm still trying to reconcile this with the idea of each person being their own blob of pathe which never intersects with the blobs of others. Their pathe have nothing in common. How can his pathe cause spasms in my pathe? The video game metaphor is still very confusing to me -video games relies on inputs and shared interface. Since you don't want anything shared, I guess you need to have each user to input directly into the other's pathe. How?
How about something like a local, immanently generated, field of resonance which 'attunes' pathe to one another? If everyone's in a locked room with no window (for the 'window' is an illusory there-ing which (pretends it) externalizes the purely internal), I don't see how anyone could ever coerce anyone else?
But that's precisely the point You don't see how. And you won't, because there is no common place for you to see in which it comes together. The lack of a thread manifests as the end of your passivity and so your ignorance.
Well I agree that being coerced ultimately hinges on our unawareness of how we're being coerced.
What I want to say is this. For a basketball game to take place each participant has to illusion (makeshift verb) in a similar way. There's the ball, the hoop etc. This is a clear condition of possibility for a basketball game's taking place. If you want to claim that each player in a game doesn't have a very similar hoop or ball projection, I'm gonna say I straight up don't believe you believe that. Almost any cooperative endeavor necessitates our experiencing similar worlds which, (I labor this point only bc I feel you require me too) need not have independent ontological integrity, outside the pathe of the collaborators.
You make it quite clear that objects (not-objects, nobjects) are nothing but externalizing-processes which we use to try to escape our inner turmoil. That's fine. In that case we externalize many things in very similar ways.
I think this raises the interesting question of how this is possible. And I think the answer lies in the fact that the infant can't grow to project a robust world unless a world-projecting being lovingly inducts him into one.
No, I disagree. Getting people to move in a certain way doesn't require they have similar subjective experiences of that movement at all.
Quoting csalisbury
Again, I disagree. I think the extent of this similarity is exaggerated.
Let's bracket the question for a moment and ask a more basic one. Instead of 'do they,' ask 'would they need to?' If not, then of course the fact that they play isn't necessarily evidence that they do.
Now ask, do symbiotic creatures need to see 'the same things' to interact, or even depend on each other to live? You can fee a squirrel an acorn -- does a squirrel see acorns?
Yeah, maybe they don't. (Hopefully there's no reporter with a shit assignment who asks each one to describe what the basketball game was like afterward. The variances would be wild. Or I guess you could do that thing of maybe what I see as orange, you see as purple. Maybe what I experience as playing basketball, you experience as masturbating in the desert while v scary ghosts try to stop you bc unejaculated semen powers their memory-wars...But we both describe those different experiences using words like 'hoop' and 'basketball') I'm going to ask you point blank: Those childhood memories of playing basketball - Do you think the other players saw a hoop, saw a basketball? Or was it just you? Can you please honestly answer this question?
Definitely not. And?
What makes the basketball players so different from the symbiotes?
Quoting csalisbury
How could I know? And what does it matter?
I'm going to ask you again, point blank, do you think the other players saw hoops and basketballs? If you don't want to answer that, that's fine. But if you're not willing to share your actual beliefs, I don't think I can honestly engage you in this conversation.
I don't know. There's no point in denying it under any pubic circumstances, but I don't see how I could have any idea.
But what do you believe?
I edited my post above, earlier, after you may have already read it. It's possible you're the only one who experienced the game of basketball as a game of basketball, with hoops and balls. That people describe similar experiences - whether in literature or journalism - seems to me a good indicator we share similar experiences. Though, again, it's possible, I guess, that each soldier who fought in Normandy had a wildly different understanding of what was going on (one was fighting a mantis to protect his eggs, one was hiding Salvia in a gatorade bottle from an art-class substitute, one was skateboarding in an abandoned warehouse, one was storming a beach under heavy gunfire). And the words those soldiers used to recount wildly different private experiences, despite sounding similar, had nothing to do with a shared experience. Maybe. It's possible.
But what do you think, in your heart of hearts. When you were playing basketball with the other ppl, did they see a hoop, a basketball. What do you believe?
When you write on philosophy forums, do you think you're talking to other people who use the words you write in similar ways? Do you think you can communicate with them? If not, why do you do it?
What do you believe? Do the other players see a hoop, see a basketball?
Why, though? Think about it.
Nothing, really -- I'm checked out for the most part. I guess I have a kind of faith in my family members, the rest of it is hard to care about. Why have a belief? It can't change anything, not even action -- you'd have to behave the same way regardless, so who cares?
Part of philosophy as I see it, in the Socratic tradition, is a devaluing of belief.
Philosophy, in the socratic tradition, requires shared experience which renders possible the discussion and critique of various particular beliefs. You can't have a socratic dialogue if you don't have multiple people who understand the same language. There's no 'Republic' if Socrates and whats-is-name don't have that mutual understanding of being-wealthy which sparks the whole thing.
I don't believe you believe the other players didn't see the ball, the hoop. You can say that's beside the point. Well. I can argue I'm the only conscious being in the world and there's no such thing as inter-affectivity and coercion and the blind fountain or any of that. How can you argue against that?
The Socratic tradition requires that ideas be tested internally on their own merits. If what you said were true, then the discussions had in the Theaetetus could not have happened, or to the audience would seem unintelligible. But they aren't.
Quoting csalisbury
I don't think you can argue it. You can say it, which is not arguing it.
That they're able to collaboratively test arguments on their internal merits at all, requires that they be able to communicate.
I wanted to know how it's possible for a basketball game to take place, where different players see the same ball, the same hoop. You have a hard time saying whether you believe different players see balls and hoops. You believe people sometimes play basketball with one another but you can't quite go the whole hog of thinking they all experience hoops and basketballs.
If you wanted to talk to someone about coercion and inter-affectivity they could, at any time, simply deny the existence of others. You could lay down sophisticated theories of intersubjectivity to which they can reply, 'oh that's all very true, that's exactly how i'm able to (quite unconsciously, naturally) to create the sense of there being other people.' Love-proxies for the infant and basketball-robots - there doesn't have to be anyone but you tgw. Your move that maybe people don't all see a basketball and a hoop when they play basketball is the same thing as the solipsist's move that all people are his projections. If you need proof, I guess we can really laboriously go through the drama of you explaining your theory of intersubjectivity to me while I pretend to be a solipsist.
A solipsist is boring because (barring mental illness) he pretends to deny what he in truth believes - that there are others - in order to defend a theory. Your hand-wringing over basketball is boring in exactly the same way.
I don't think this option is open, because the position being outlined here isn't compatible with solipsism. Solipsism is a transcendental position, which is against the spirit of the sort of 'outside' and blindness I'm talking about. This is something that it shares with realism, as many authors note. Ignorance, even systematic ignorance, is not the same as denial.
Quoting csalisbury
But there does, because as I said, I'm utterly dependent on what's beyond my control. What there doesn't have to be, and what you seem to want their to be, are other people on my terms -- that is, the 'not really other people' of the realist, other people who are reducible to me and have to be common to me.
Work me through " I think other people see basketballs and hoops when I play basketball with them" -> "I want people to be reducible to me."
Sure there's your pathe blob over which you have little control. And there's no one else with pathe blobs.
The irony in your position is that you can't fathom other people existing unless they are like you, so much so that the idea that other people might be different form you in substantial ways makes you think of solipsism.
What's troubling to me is that you can't conceive of sharing without it becoming engulfment - and this to the point where you can't give a straight answer about whether you actually believe other people see basketball and hoops.
That the other people see hoops and basketballs hardly means we are basically the same people. There's all sorts of distance between us in a million ways. But when we play basketball we still see basketballs and hoops.
That there exist insurmountable gaps between people was an emotional axiom for me long before it became a philosophical one, which it remains. It's precisely that giant gulf between everyone that makes the ability to share things so interesting.
If there is something people share, it's that.
Oh, I agree, though it took me a while to understand that. I went through a thing of reading everything David Foster Wallace wrote (except for Broom of The System, which was boring to me.) And then talking to other people about DFW. And that drove it all home.
But sometimes people do get each other, briefly, and that comes from collaboration. And, sure, even getting-each-other, in these situations, contains a distance. As you say, this allows for novelty.
But as lonely as all the basketball players may be, they still see basketballs and hoops.
For me this isn't the goal (everyone is the same and we all see the exact same things so there is no loneliness), but a starting point. This makes me interested in understanding how people come to share, briefly, certain environments. Or how they're able to engage in each other in conflict.
I'm having a hard time trying to outline what your debate is about. Would you be able to break it down in more plain English? You two seem to have a kind of inside language that I am not quite grasping. I hope by mentioning "inside language" I am not bolstering anyone's argument about the idea of language and separateness!
As far as I can see TGW views human experience as isolated and unrelatable. csalisbury views language as at least intersubjective. I think TGW has a point in some regards, in that at the experiential level, it may be the case that humans have very unique subjective experiences that language cannot capture accurately. This was an argument I made for why it is hard to really measure someone else's suffering based on one's own experiences. There may be nuances that cannot be expressed. At the same time, I don't think language is completely devoid of creating a feeling of community. It does let you into the minds of others, though not necessarily with complete verity.
Language is a funny thing because it works as a poor man's way to get one's own experiences across to others. It can never tell the whole story and it can be distorted and misinterpreted by both the story teller and the story listener. No one can "really" know what it is like to be you, and perhaps much frustration in dealing with others is their lack of understanding of what it's like to be you. However, I'm sure there have been moments when you have truly empathized with someone's experiences and they have truly empathized with yours. This is the phenomena when you hear what someone is conveying and you feel exactly the same way about the situation, and it has a ring of truth to it. This can come close to shared experience. The nuances will be varied in the two people's actual experience, but it is probably in the ball park.
Yeah, this just another chapter in a discussion TGW & I have been having for years which might account for the feeling of an inside language. I agree that there's a lot - a whooole lot - of personal experiences more or less impossible to convey to others. But I think there are shared things, otherwise we couldn't interact with one another in the ways we do.
TGW has a model or metaphor of being which I understand as something like a churning stew of passions (TGW uses the term 'pathe.')Pathe always have a 'mineness.' I only experience my pathe. Over time these pathe are painstakingly, and largely unsconsciously, molded into the 'world' phenomenologists speak of. The 'world' I experience (think also of Schop's world-as-idea subjected to the PSR) is nothing but my molded passions and as such has no reality of its own. Its kind of an iceberg-tip that many people forget relies on an iceberg base. I think this is mostly good but that it's difficult to get from this to people sharing - to limited extents - worlds. I think the answer is that the world-forming of our passions is largely sculpted by others, and that this begins with the infant-caregiver relationship.
At this point TGW seems to me to be avoiding the problematic of the shared by saying its possible - in principle - that that when people do stuff like play basketball not all of them actually see balls and hoops. They are in "sync" but, in their own experience, are doing wildly different activities. I agree that this is perhaps possible in principle but have trouble taking it seriously, in the same way I have trouble taking solipsism seriously.
Thank you for your clear response that lays out your main arguments. I have a question that is sort of tangential but related. I have been curious as to how Schopenhauer accounts for the world-as-idea-that-is-subjected-to-PSR in a world that is "actually" Will. TGW's interpretation of this seems to be an illusion of sorts. Then he tried to explain this further, but I sort of had trouble understanding his explanation of how an illusion of world-as-idea does not need to be explained. Anyways.. that might be an interesting place to start to try to circle back and answer the more specific question of language and intersubjectivity.
He's gestured toward an explanation in that we gain a modicum of mastery over our pathe by instrumentally externalizing them. He's also gestured toward an emotional/traumatic explanation of externalization as a way of evading our inner turmoil. But these are just gestures and, though I have a lot of sympathy for these ways of looking at things, I don't think such broad indications constitute adequate explanations.
I don't know if you've read all of this thread, but I cited a study in which infants deprived of human contact are severely developmentally disabled. They seem to have trouble mastering their pathe. That's why I think the caregiver-infant relationship is a good place to begin investigating how the world-as-idea comes about (for an individual at least.)
(FWIW My way of approaching the issues of world-generation stems philosophically from a base of Kant, Hedeigger, Deleuze & Zizek, but more specifically from my current engagement with the work of (the contemporary german philosopher) Peter Sloterdijk. I admire Schop's lucidity, elegance & eloquence but I personally get more from Kant+Schelling, where, crudely, the former is world-as-idea and the latter is world-as-will. I like Hegel a lot too, but he takes a lot of effort, and I've barely scratched the surface. My approach stems experientially from my current participation in transference-based therapy, where transference is purposefully triggered in the purpose of dismantling it in order to create a shared space)
Yes but I am just wondering where the PSR fits into World as will. If world is Will, how does space, time, and causality exist as a structure outside of this? Again, I'm guessing it has something to do with illusion, but that then has to be accounted for as something else besides Will. Why is there this double aspect and not just Will proper?
From http://philosophycourse.info/lecsite/lec-schop-will.html:
[quote=Schopenhauer]Therefore, destined originally to serve the will for the achievement of its aims, knowledge [what I've called consciousness] remains almost throughout entirely subordinate to its service; this is the case with all animals and almost all men.[/quote]
That is, almost all humans have only enough consciousness, or mind, to help them meet their will's needs.
If Idea is created from Will, Why need it be structured with time/space/causality in the first place?
Or, If Idea is not created from Will but is its double aspect, why is it that it takes this on this world of multiplicity as mediated by the PSR?
In either conception (Idea created by or Idea as double aspect of Will), the question is still essentially the same. If Will is beyond space and time, then why must it also have the double aspect of also being an idea mediated by space and time the way it does?
Don't get me wrong, I love Schopenhauer and think his writing has more wisdom than most philosophers and men of letters that I have read. However, I still have certain questions which he may have answered but I am missing, or simply was not written about.
Here are some questions for Schopenhauer:
1) Just as the realist/materialist must account for how mind is tied with matter, Schopenhauer's idealism has to explain how it is matter is from mind (Will). Why is it that a fourfold PSR tied together through time and space (a pretty hefty package) is tied with Will at all?
2) Schopenhauer seems to go back and forth as to whether boredom and survival is the route of almost all human motivation, or whether it is more instinctual. There is kind of an underlying wavering between Will as free in its listless boredom or Will as tied to instinct. It specifically is rather contradictory when it comes to attraction/sex/love/procreation. Is the human experience to want to have union with someone (both physically and emotionally) a manifestation of our existential loneliness or is it from some sort of unconscious instinct to mate? I have an easier time believing the former but not as much for the latter.
The whole evolutionary biological approach to human behavior seems a bit too mechanistic from my own individual experiences. Boredom to me rings true as a motivation for almost anything outside of quelling the basic survival needs of hunger and maintaining relative comfortable living environment. Attraction is probably more cultural than our faux-science pop-cultural evolutionary psychology literature wants to admit.
It is hard for people to see their lives as just escaping boredom. I can imagine a usual Westerner response: "No no..wait all my exercise, gardening, video gaming, and reading is for um um... self-improvement???" People cannot except that boredom is simply driving them to get caught up in something. Society's job is to then mold that boredom motivation to be geared towards what it deems as productive. What is deemed as productive is based on factors like what has kept the society surviving from the past, whatever seems useful for survival. Some societies add in all sorts of freedoms for how to be productive, but just because there is more relative freedom in choices, doesn't mean that through structural institutions, subtle coercive measures, and education, it is not being shaped to a particular format which is itself contingent on historical circumstances.
If there really is a Will, then I wonder why the world is not just an exponentially-growing pit of never-ending slavery to desire, with the inhabitants literally dragging their feet on the ground as they attempt to cope with the desire but ultimately unable to reflect upon it.
This is a good point. It is more of a tepid Will than a ferocious Will. But maybe, even if we can think of a worst possible world, this is actually how bad it can get?
Quoting darthbarracuda
This kind of furthers the point I was making earlier as to why is this PSR/Time/Space actual reality that is presented to us the way it is, and not another way? I can get a striving force that is just "there", and I can get the world of representation being the playground for the Will to try to get its needs met (which ultimately fail in any complete sense of satiation), but why is it this kind of world with this hefty PSR/Time/Space/Causality? Why would that be how it manifests itself?
It kind of leads to an implicit answer of contingency. There seems to be something contingent in the world of Ideas, but then this introduces an idea of radical contingency not radical Will behind things, or at least, it would seem so to me. Why must this non-space/time/causality be limited or manifested in this way, and not another? Will just automatically creates this and only this type of world of Idea with a space/time/casuality? That would also possibly make the idea dictate what the Will is, which another thing that Schopenhauer seems to want to avoid.
Schopenhauer uses an appeal to modality to argue against Leibniz' claim that this is the best of all possible worlds. He does so by arguing that god could change the parameters of possibilities - and if he cannot, then he is no god after all.
But if the Will is the source of the Idea, then I don't understand why the Will seems to be constrained. We can imagine a world worse than this (just as we can imagine a world better than this). I can imagine myself stuck at work for another hour overtime instead of writing this post. I can imagine suddenly and intensely feeling lust for an unknown subject. I can imagine there being one more African in Sierra Leone mining blood diamonds than there are in the actual world.
It's because of this that I believe that Schopenhauer over-emphasized the Will. Indeed I don't think that there is a harm of existence, but rather harms in existence. I doubt this is the best of all possible worlds, and I doubt that this is the worst of all possible worlds.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Good question. Too bad Schopenhauer is dead, I have some questions for him.
The Will seems its own Idea which seems to have a curious structure. He also adds gradations of Ideas into the picture. Why all of this? But I think Schopenhauer's Will is more a force of dissatisfaction not necessarily pure malevolence. It is not that it is trying to cause as much suffering as possible, but that it's constantly striving for nothing in particular and this causes constant action and force in lower gradations, and suffering in conscious and self-conscious gradations.
The nature of the Will, i.e. the "striving" of it, seems to have a correlation to creation and an abrupt halt in interest in this creation. Perhaps we can envision the Will as a kind of deistic god, one that creates things simply because it can and has a divine case of ADHD. I'm going off more of a metaphorical account of cosmology rather than a strict metaphysical account, but we can imagine the world being sustained by the very interest of the Will. As the Will loses interest, so does the Idea fade (entropy).
I don't quite understand though why the Will would create something that can seemingly oppose it because it suffers due to the Will. Is it just by accident that the Will creates beings that can suffer? Why does there seem to be exceptions to the Will? Not everything in the world is chaotic, random, or striving. I'm not sure why or how the Will would create a world that is not in its own nature. Perhaps as the Will loses interest, the Idea fights back and attempts to sustain the world, creating conscious life (like mini-Wills) in a vain attempt for self-preservation.
In a way, Schopenhauer's Will reminds me of the teleology of Aristotelian metaphysics. A substance is drawn towards its telos because of its very essence. But not everything can reach perfection.
Interesting mythos. I think Schopenhauer may have been less inclined to think of Will as so thoughtful or purposeful. It was blind, and thus from the objective standpoint, is what we might deem as the contingent nature of cause and effect. Will just goes blindly, seeking completion and in doing so builds into various matter/energy formations and gradations. This occurred through sheer force of causality which is mediated-Will through space/time to create species like us who have an excess of consciousness beyond that which keeps us sustained and alive.. We can reason about our situation and get existentially bored, lonely.. and thus the pendulum swing from survival to boredom.. and the self-help of absurdism/asceticism/hedonism/self-improvement regimens and the like. All of it just stop-gap for a species with more consciousness than we know what to do with, and a happenstance of contingency which is to say blind Will moving forward through space/time. Of course, this does not provide any more insight into why it is Will needs to mediate through this particular structure of space/time/causality other than we know that it appears to us to exist, at least as mental constructs. We see what's behind it (Will), but not why the appearances need to be constructed in such a way in the first place.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yes there seems to be similarities there.
Yes yes yes. That's my other stumbling block with Schop's account. When consciousness bloomed into being, it would have to have bloomed already-situated within a certain 'world' (used in the broadest possible sense.)
There's something irreducible here. I wonder if it's a 'will'/idea split all the way down. A kind of panpsychism that (like those escher hands someone posted above) always relies on something outside of consciousness, which in turn relies on it. I really don't know though
Not all the way down, no, Schop. is explicit that presentation is only applicable to sentient creatures, and is an outgrowth of will which is prior. It's also not quite a split, in that presentation just is the objectification of will (though confusingly, Schop. calls it also 'toto genere distinct' from it). As for what the will is like for non-sentient creatures, this is less clear. He speaks of a 'dull hunger' that drives ceaseless inanimate forces that compete against one another, like gravity. Clearly this is metaphorical -- there aren't any panpsychist suggestions to the effect that matter is literally hunger or feels a struggle. Yet in our own case, our knowledge of the will comes from things like hunger and sexual frustration. It seems from Schop's comments in Volume II that what this means is that though we have access to the thing in itself via our own case of willing, this is still through a sort of veil, which can never be entirely removed, and the thing in itself in its unity or entirety is closed off to us, and as in the Kantian tradition is totally inaccessible. We only get a sort of glimpse into its character by being one piece of it, a piece that can only reflect on itself through the veil of Maya.
Quoting schopenhauer1
As I understand it, Schop. would say this question is confused because asking why presupposes the techniques to be found in the phenomenal realm subject to the principle of sufficient reason. That is, seeking explanation is itself a means that the will has for manipulating its presentations to satisfy itself -- to ask why the will objectifies itself, and why in this way rather than that, is to make a category error, and not fully understand the import of the philosophy. Again, the Spirit blows where it pleases. I don't think this means the philosophy is insufficient or that it has nothing left to say at that point -- rather it dares to look at the very notion of explanation more penetratingly than most philosophers will allow, taking it as a genuine object of inquiry rather than being assumed. The level at which the will 'blows' one way rather than another isn't to be explained -- it's to be enacted and willingly changed in breaking free. The desire and attempt to explain is a kind of willing.
Yeah, I know it works this way for Schop, I was speculatin' for myself there.
A disturbing quote to this effect from Schop.: "...the will must live on itself, for there exists nothing beside it, and it is a hungry will." Schop's favored image of how the world works is one animal eating another. Since we are all objectifications of the same will, it is literally eating itself (and people in harming each other are aware in a vague and traumatic sense that they are harming themselves).
Okay. I'm not keen on panpsychism generally, sine it seems like a cop-out in the form of another retreat into the familiar or quasi-solipsism (I can only understand something else existing if it is 'like me'). I could be wrong though. I like the idea of mutual dependence, but in a way that I think we have trouble grasping -- we tend to think of interdependence in terms of an interlocking ecosystem that fits together in some larger picture. The difficult conceptual twist is to think of this dependence without any ecosystem or larger picture.
How does the Will live on itself without eventually running out of anything to feed on? Like an ouroboros, it cannot constantly eat itself. Unless of course the Will is outside of the laws of thermodynamics and energy conservation, in which case it just becomes a mystical metaphor with little actual explanatory power except for illuminating the human condition.
If life did not exist, would there be any Will to self-cannibalize? Are we talking entropy here?
Yeah, when I try to think about panpsychism, I try to think of it by analogy to the onset of (certain) psychoactive drugs: adjacent moments, though different, are at least mutually intelligible. But the final state, the peak, is so unlike the beginning as to be unintelligible from its vantage. Again this is only a crudge analogy, because the difference between different 'levels' of consciousness would probably be much more dramatic.
I agree, (though i think ecosystem-like patterns crop up, for a time. There's just no great chain of being, no super-ecosystem. I wish I understood set theory better because it seems to offer some good metaphors.)
Schop. believes that the Will will eventually destroy itself, because it will create creatures (us) whose powers of representation become advanced enough that we begin to understand what we're doing and voluntarily give up the self-defeating game, abnegating the will.
Quoting darthbarracuda
It is outside those laws and all physical laws, because those laws are just objectifications of it. It isn't a metaphor because it's more real and concretely known than any physical or represented thing.
Quoting darthbarracuda
On the one hand yes, because there was a point at which life didn't exist. On the other hand, the will is 'the will to life.' Life seems to be the inevitable outcome of its striving, which Schop. explains by a bizarre proto-Darwinian mechanism of competition between forces.
No offense but this is kind of a cop-out. If it's outside the laws, how can it act on them?
Why would the Will (to live) create something that would eventually lead to a rejection of the will to live? Why would it hasten its own demise?
It doesn't act on them -- the laws are an objectification of it. It's 'behind' the laws, not on a par with them.
Quoting darthbarracuda
It doesn't have reasons for what it does. Reasons belong to the phenomenal world, which it is prior to.
Then why is it possible to not strive for life? Why is it possible to meditate, enjoy aesthetics, commit suicide, etc? Surely these would also be objectifications of the Will?
No, these are (barring suicide, for Schop.) negations of the will, and they are only possible in beings whose willings have created very complex representational capacities that then end up causing the will to shoot itself in the foot. For example, in enjoying art, representation takes on a life of its own and starts to enjoy itself for its own sake, disentangling itself from the will. If there is an 'objectification' here, what's being objectified is in a way the will 'committing suicide.'
Gravity for example keeps us rooted to the ground. But we still made airplanes and rockets that counteract this gravity. We have to work against gravity but we can still do it. But gravity is not a metaphysical, all-encompassing force. Gravity is within the world. So it is understandable that we can counteract gravity, for we are not objectifications of gravity. But if we are objectifications of the Will to Live, then it should be apparent that it should be impossible for us to have evolved cognitive capacities to counteract this Will to Live. It would be against the fundamental nature of the Will to create beings that do not Will.
The Will would presumably "want" to continue to Will for as long as possible. Creating beings that do not Will only hastens the end of the Will. Consciousness and the ability to reflect upon the pointlessness of the Will should not be possible if we are manifestations of the Will. Our consciousness and reflective ability must have come from something else if we are to take seriously this theory of the Will.
But I am not asking why the Will is Will but rather why the flip side of Will is structured the way it is. I believe that question to be valid, being that the flip side does exist and it exists in a certain way. What is it about Will that entails this structure? If Will is a blind striving force- why this particular flip side of it? I am guessing that a possible answer might be that subject cannot exist without object, and thus, the object needs to be there- it is not caused by Will but is the flip side of Will. Space, time, and causality are necessary structures that Will uses to make itself known to itself.
1) If subject needs object, how would that occur prior to the first organisms who create representations to know itself? How would the force of gravity allow Will to know itself?
2) If organisms can change, this contradicts the Schopenhauer's platonic forms. Evolution does not happen on grand scales as much as microchanges that might become catalyzed by large catastrophes. Anyways, it seems that the phenomena of mutations in DNA and natural selection, does not lend itself to the idea of stable Platonic gradations or Ideas that Schopenhauer thought existed and accounted for objects being the way they are when influenced by the PSR and space/time/causality.
I was wondering what you thought about the two questions posed in my last post.
Before there are sentient creatures, there are no subjects or objects.
Pre-conscious forces result in consciousness arising as a kind of 'arms race' that the will sets up against itself: when forces clash, new forces arise to 'resolve' the dispute, and consciousness is basically just an extremely convoluted way for the Will to 'eat itself' by navigating its increasingly complex and painful urges. Schop. basically articulates a kind of pre-Darwinian theory of evolution, but one that applies 'all the way down,' not just to biological organisms. Basically the whole universe is in a competition for survival against itself and there is perpetual pressure to develop more and more complex ways of willing. Consciousness is a sort of growth out of the will, which services its desires by finding a way to objectify and control them.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Schopenhauer's Ideas don't really seem to play the same generative role that Plato's do. Yes, he believes in timeless forms, but his notion of time is more nuanced than Plato's -- thee is a sense in which time doesn't 'really' pass, but not in the sense that it's the moving image of some eternal atempral thing, but rather because like with Kant time is just a form of intuition, and so at any point the Ideas will always appear eternal and tenseless, and can only be grasped aesthetically when representation examines itself in momentary freedom from the will. Can new Ideas rise up in time? Well, yes and no -- Schop. claims that animals arose at some point in natural history. But the idea that an Idea arises as well is literally nonsensical -- for there to be an Idea is for it to appear timelessly, in the 'standing present,' like a rainbow over a storm, there as a 'result' of what's happening and yet not really there, not really interacting with anything. Schop. is very Eastern in considering time ultimately to be a kind of illusion. It only exists insofar as it services the will's ends and is tied to the individual organism seeking out satisfactions of its individual will, but to contemplate the Forms or Ideas is to represent independently of the will, and so not to see things as arising and disappearing in time.
If that is the case, then there is no causality in this pre-conscious period, and if there is no causality, as in this system, then there is no time and space either. Causality is presupposed by time and space which in turn is presupposed by representation. Therefore, before sentient objects we get the classic Idealist dilemma. In this case replace consciousness with representation (which for all intents and purposes here act as the same thing). Even if gravity "experiences" or forces experience things as an "inner" subject- they do not have representation, which only animal organisms possess. This brings us back to the dilemma. Even worse, you start get "out of nowhere" the representation and it starts to look like any materialist argument where consciousness comes from non-consciousness but without a real explanation. Instead of neurons it is just this pre-conscious forces. It is not just Darwinian mechanisms that have to go all the way down, but the subject-object relationship has to go all the way down too, otherwise the dilemma rears its ugly head.
Quoting The Great Whatever
This is a bit muddled and I am having trouble parsing out your main idea. Indeed, animals change on micro levels of biochemistry at the representational level. If Ideas are not pre-existing atemporal things, then what is their use in his system other than to explain art (which is not a reason as much as a way to tie the two realms of philosophy)? The Ideas, I assume are archetypes for the representation in space/time and can be intuited by aesthetic contemplation. A possible answer might be that, in some atemporal way, the Ideas are already there, but time just realizes them, but that does not make sense because Will is change and "movement" and these forms are constant and thus seem out of place.
One possible way to solve this is to say that each micro-level change has an Idea but this is more of just a notion. I haven't fully developed it.
Also, not that Schop is necessarily a panpsychist, but I think the same arguments can apply against force having any sort of experience. As we all know, "consciousness" proper only occurs in organisms that have neural systems. Feeling seems associated with a particular phenomena. Your skin cells don't seem to have their own experience, Rather, our nervous system seems to be the tissue where experience resides.
However, you may make the counterargument that perhaps an organism, being that it comes from the same origin (stem cells) is a sort of organic whole, thus experience can reside in non-neural objects as long as there is a sort of unity of composition of that object. In other words, my body and the chair it sits upon do not have the unity that my skin cells have with my nervous system.
However, a counterargument to this can be where does the unity end for non-organic objects? When does the chairs leather stop being leather and start being another object? What gives it unity? Then, we must ask, if only some objects have unity and others do not, this brings us back tot he same problem but just slightly broadened from the argument that only neural tissue is where experience resides.
My understanding of the Schoplatonic ideas is that they're bound up intimately with capacity. To understand the 'idea' of something is not merely to contemplate its appearance or structure, but to know how it would act or react under different circumstances. This is why he has recourse to Malebranche's theory of occasional causality. It seems that microchanges in an organism wouldn't lead to a new Idea unless they reached a critical mass and changed the ways that organism would act in a given situation. (Perhaps the critical point in a phase transition would be a better metaphor than 'critical mass')
I like TGW's rainbow-over-a-storm metaphor. But it suggests the Ideas are concomitant with - yet of another order than - the phenomena. Schop's picture feels a little murkier.*
[quote=S]The force itself is a manifestation of will, and as such is not subject to the forms of the principle of sufficient reason, that is, it is groundless. It lies outside all time, is omnipresent, and seems as it were to wait constantly till the circumstances occur under which it can appear and take possession of a definite matter, supplanting the forces which have reigned in it till then. All time exists only for the phenomena of such a force, and is without significance for the force itself. Through thousands of years chemical forces slumber in matter till the contact with the reagents sets them free; then they appear; but time exists only for the phenomena, not for the forces themselves. For thousands of years galvanism slumbered in copper and zinc, and they lay quietly beside silver, which must be consumed in flame as soon as all three are brought together under the required conditions. Even in the organic kingdom we see a dry seed preserve the slumbering force through three thousand years, and when at last the favourable circumstances occur, grow up as a plant.[/quote]
Here, he speaks as though there is always this otherworldly matrix of possible 'clashes' between forces (as well as of possible resolutions-through-subjugation-of-parts in higher ideas) and that these possibilities are actualized through the will's development in time.
----------------
*FWIW I prefer TGW's metaphor which echoes a passage I've always liked from Deleuze's Logic of Sense: [quote=Deleuze]"For if bodies with their states, qualities, and quantities, assume all the characteristics of substance and cause, conversely the characteristics of the Idea are relegated to the other side, that is to this impassive extra-Being which is sterile, inefficacious, and on the surface of things: the ideational or the incorporeal can never be anything other than an 'effect'[...]These effects are not bodies[...]They are not things and facts, but events. We can not say that they exist, but rather than they subsist or inhere (having this minimum of being which is appropriate to that which is not a thing, a nonexisting entity.) They are not substantives or adjectives but verbs. They are neither agents nor patients, but results of actions and passions. They are 'impassive' entities - impassive results.[/quote]
It's Schopenhauer's! :)
noooooo :-#
Allow me to strategically salvage my point and say it seems as though Schopenhauer is internally conflicted about what, precisely, he means.
But again, I do not think this answers the question. How is it that representations come out of nowhere at "x" particular time? If the representations do not come from the beginning along with Will itself, then there is no explanations for how representation, time, space, and causality even came about? You need to have the world of representation in order for time, space, and causality to be there in the first place. If it is not there from the beginning, then there is a gap in explanation that is similar to any other theory of mind, or epistemology in general whether materialist or idealist.
Two of my friends used to have a running joke where they'd compete to come up with the worst Coors advertisements. One of them made this one:
The best I can do is gesture toward that mobius-strip panpsychism I mentioned above. But I really don't know.
*I should mention I've never read the appendix criticizing Kant, only the main text of WWR Vol. 1 and The Fourfold Root (though that was probably 3 years ago now? It's faded quite a bit, as has much of WWR)
I'm assuming everything else here means with Will/force or whatnot. That to me, would not go along with Schopenhauer's own system where space/time are transcendental and thus mediated by representation. However, representation doesn't exist on the scene until there is an organism that has representation. I would not think time and space are independent or prior to this.
If experiential forms can form representations. I thought only biological organisms can form representations in his view. Let me see if I can find a quote. Well, I'm not sure if this is as good, but I found this website which I think says what I am saying, but you have to scroll towards the bottom sections http://critique-of-pure-reason.com/schopenhauers-key-concepts-1-representation-vostellung/
It sounds like the recognize the point that the representations can't exist before the first animal. Though subjectivity exists before representations, it's hard to think that a world of objects exists before representations. From the article:
[quote=critique-of-pure-reason website] If space, time and causality are mind-dependent, then what can it mean to say that the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, before the advent of life? Before any knowing consciousness existed, what do “years” and “the Earth” refer to, and what does “formed” mean, without space, time, objects and causality?
Schopenhauer sees the problem:
Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent on the first knowing being [...]; on the other hand, this first perceiving animal just as necessarily wholly dependent on a long chain of causes and effects which has preceded it [...] These two contradictory views, to each of which we are led with equal necessity, might certainly be called an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge [...] [Vol I §7]
His answer is that the past exists now, for us, and came to exist for the first knowing consciousness. When it made this first appearance, it already had the character of endlessness in both directions, past and future. So, oddly enough, time had a beginning but was and is inherently beginningless. The same goes for the world as representation in general. Objects of the past are objects for us just as much as present objects are. This does rather make it seem as if ancestral objects are nothing but fictions. At least with objects which exist among conscious beings in the present we can say that they are manifesting the will, but now it seems that the ancient Earth and its objects and events are nothing but convenient stories. However this is not quite right. We say that the moon is about 400,000 kilometres from the Earth, yet neither the Moon nor this distance have any reality beyond our representations. The ancient Earth, separated from us by time rather than space, is no less real than this – which is still as real as can be – though it can obviously never be an object of perception for us. It is “less real” only insofar as we ordinarily think of ancient objects as somehow less real.[/quote]
Oh yeah, I think it's definitely true, for Schopenhauer, that (re)presentations depend on (re)presenting organisms. In that bit I quoted from WWR in the OP, he's pretty explicit about that. But he also doesn't seem to really care about the paradoxes.
Right, but that doesn't seem right either.
I agree, and can only see 3 avenues out: panpsychism, some revamped noumenal theory (though I don't know exactly what that would look like) or mysticism. Or some combination of the 3.
Well, it's not necessarily the paradox as much time and space does not exist outside representing organisms. This, to me, raises a problem that I stated earlier so I will quote it down here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Let me qualify "x" particular time as I guess time 0 of the existing phenomenal organism with full blown subject/object double-aspect. Before time 0 there was no subject/object dichotomy. There is here a sort of step that is missing which is how things went from before time 0 to time 0. It's kind of like materialist/realists who want to explain the hard problem by piling on more scientific theory and neural networks, etc. f you get a enough threshold of neuron, BOOM consciousness and experience come about. Here, instead of neurons, we are piling on more Will until BOOM experience comes about. And if it is not about Will piling up to the threshold of representation, then again, I am just using that theory as a placeholder for the missing step between time 0 (representation with subject/object aspect) and before time 0 (no representation and no subject/object aspect).
Yeah, I mean I'm not all that interested in taking this convo from the top. The disagreements at that level are vast, insuperable, built of other disagreements. You think ppl share no world, I think they do. Idk, I guess we just have different approaches. I don't think, at this point, we can benefit much from one another.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Well, I thought I brought up a good point.
How is this any different from esoteric nonsense? If you can't communicate, or at least help someone understand what these insights are, they're only important to you. And unless you're about to claim that you're infallible, there is a concern about whether or not it's bullshit.
Yes.
Sorry for the delayed response; I missed this before. To deny the suffering available means of ease would be perverse unless it was driven by doctrine (and maybe arguably then also); denying them on the grounds that they had been elected (or condemned) by God or Karma, or whatever higher authority or order, to suffer.
I'm not seeing it as "empathy for proofs" but as adherence to dogma. Do you mean to say that many pessimistic philosophers think that people should suffer, or that many pessimistic philosophers are wedded to their own dogma that people suffer more than they enjoy, and to their attendant dogma that therefore life is shit?
So you seemed to get the question but I did not see a response.
This is a bit convoluted, but if I unpack it, he is saying that time did not exist before the first organism, even if appearances say otherwise. This shows his sympathies to Kant's transcendental idealism. Time and space are only existent in a mind, but are not existent outside this. Thus, before the first organism, time is non-existent. Rather, timeless Will is, in actuality, the ever present, and the idea of a a beginning and end is just an appearance of the mind, but not the reality of the situation. I get this. The only answer that makes sense here to my question is that, time/space/causality has always been around as the objective form of Will. The time before representing organism (Kronos) is only a trick of time itself. There was no time before the first organism, and all things that can be said to happen before that, did not happen in any absolute sense, but only in the seeming sense, that it "seems" like things happened before the first organism, but it did not.
This to me, just seems intuitively not convincing. It does seem that there was a time/space causality before the first organism. Though, I understand and put much value in his idea that there needs to be some sort of mind-dependent time/space/causality framework by a representing organism for phenomenal events to take place, it seems quite an odd theory to say that everything relies on the first organism's ability to represent the subject/object relationship for the whole of existence to be realized. Schopenhauer would even concede that time and space from the point of the first representing organism would at least move forward as we are familiar. How it is that that organism just "is" without cause, seems a bit odd.
There was, but this fact only arises once consciousness does. In other words, the way consciousness is structured is such that it must project time backward.
No, I think most pessimistic philosophers begin as sincere sensitive souls, who truly wish that things were different. But this kind of pessimism easily devolves (or calcifies) into a narcissism of suffering, of striking the pose of the the Saint in Agony. It's worth noting that Beckett, Cioran & Schopenhauer all had exquisitely maintained hair. I've mentioned that before, I think, here or on the other forum and I've also mentioned my favorite anecdote - Cioran's letter to someone or other about seeing Beckett on a park bench and being just bowled over with envy for how deeply he appeared to be in despair. Susan Sontag, apropos of Cioran, describes the pessimistic style as often veering dangerously close to a 'coquettishness of the void.' . One becomes invested in one's pose and routine, which begins earnestly, but which becomes a well-oiled machine that runs on examples and aestheticizations of suffering. To quote Beckett: ''I must have got embroiled in a kind of inverted spiral, I mean one the coils of which, instead of widening more and more, grew narrower and narrower and finally, given the kind of space in which I was supposed to evolve, would come to an end for lack of room"
(btw, re: Mother Theresa, "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people." This is, for sure, perverse.)
I actually don't think he is saying that time existed in any absolute sense before consciousness. Rather, I think he is saying that we believe that time existed before consciousness because it simply appears that way based on how consciousness is structured. So, before the first organism, in the absolute sense of the term, there was no actual time. This is why I find the notion odd. The organism had to be around at all times for there to be any phenomenal world of appearances. You cannot even say that there was Will before time and then there was Will + time. If you do say this, then you have the odd notion that time is being caused, when that is not his theory. Time/space/causality is simply the flip side of will. Time/space/causality only adheres in organisms. Organisms cannot exist before point 0. Since time/space/causality is the flip side of will, since organisms need to exist for there to be time/space/causality, then organisms had to exist in some ever present state for there to be time/space/causality.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Time doesn't really 'exist,' for Schopenhauer, since existence is 'reality' or roughly 'causality,' which presupposes time. Time isn't real in the Kantian framework in a very substantive sense -- it's ideal.
Quoting schopenhauer1
You are thinking of the world as temporal in-itself, which Schop. denies. It's as if the organisms are 'keeping' time in place, so they had to be around since the beginning, making sure that the time before there was time didn't cause a paradox. But if you scrap all that and realize that time isn't real in the above sense, none of this is problematic.
Great images, csalisbury! I agree with you about the aesthetization of suffering which is characteristic of such narcissistic figures.
It would seem that in order to render the aesthetization of their suffering on the grand scale, they must also universalize it, that is they must take it to represent a great and universal truth; and they are consequently wedded to the dogma that life is shit (and of course in their own eyes they have in some sense, in their greatness, risen above it, like the proverbial lily that grows in a dungheap).
The first part of your statement seems to be a misreading of Schop to me. Existence is reality- yes. However, "roughly causality which presupposes time", One part of causality is the result of time and space's presence which happens in a fourfold root structure that he called The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. I don't get how causality, time, and space are not manifest in world of appearance? It seems real in the sense that it is part of the world of appearances.
As for your second statement that time isn't real in the Kantian framework, yes I just said that when I said time doesn't exist in any absolute sense for Schopenhauer and that this follows Kantian's transcendental framework. So you seemed to restate what I said as if I did not agree with you.
Quoting The Great Whatever
This is also seems to be a misreading to me. I already agreed that Schop is sympathetic to Kant's transcendental idealism, and thus time is not real outside independent of mind. I get that. But I don't see how it follows that time isn't real. Will needs time/space/causality in order for the world to be Will and Representation. Otherwise, the world is just Will and not representation. You have a couple problems if you say the world is just Will and representation is not "real". Here are some problems:
1) Clearly Schop thinks that representation is fair game, and that this is an "aspect" of reality that is the flip side of Will.
2) If Will is primary and representation is an illusion or somehow subordinate or secondary, then you have to explain how it is that representation is created by Will. This is the same problem as the materialists when it comes to problems of consciousness. A materialist who does not understand the hard problem of consciousness might say- "at point x, enough neurons got together and poof the first primitive first-person, experiential consciousness came about!". At the same point, you will have the problem with your (possible?) interpretation of Schop. There is first Will (just think of this as the "neurons" in the materlist theory). You have enough Will and poof, out comes representation. That does not seem right.
So, in order to counteract this idea, we have to say that representation is not secondary, but is rather the flip side of Will that ensures that there is always an object for the subject. It was there all along. However, this conclusion leads to the odd idea that organism were there all along. In other words, the most primitive organism was ever present along with Will.
Here is the thing- you can say that representation is an illusion and Will is primary, but this is almost as bad as the fallacy of eliminative materialists that say consciousness is an illusion. The illusion, has to be accounted for. The illusion of time's existence is still something that exists- qua appearances as rel rather than absolutely real. This appearance could not be "created" or "caused" since that does not exist outside of time/space. The ever present must exist along side the time-contingent in this model. The odd conclusion is that the first organism has to always be around as it can never be caused.
They're not part of the world of appearances, but their transcendental ground ala Kant. Everything of the world of appearances is in time and space, but time and space are not in that world.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Alright, but your responses don't seem to be fully consistent with the point.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The will doesn't need time, space, etc. Only presentation does. The will doesn't always objectify itself as presentation.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, I think this makes the mistake of reifying causality as something applying to the thing in itself. How does the will 'make' representations?
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is just not Schop's position. Presentation is secondary, as one sort of behavior the will participates in (objectifying itself). Nothing needs to 'ensure' that there are objects. Objects only exist for representing creatures.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The organism does exist in a kind of timeless present, but that's not the same as it being eternal or having always existed in the past (eternality is not timelessness) -- to think this again seems to reify time inappropriately.
And again, causation doesn't apply to the will as such, only to the forms of representation, when time and space interact. But these are only veils used to objectify the will.
I've noticed this too. What do you make of that? Wouldn't it make since that women who are downtrodden, unemployed, socially unskilled etc. would be equally antinatalist and pessimistic?
My reproach to the antinatalists and pessimists isn't that they're wrong, necessarily, but that denying 'the river' can only be a pose, even if sincerely meant. The river doesn't care etc. People will always have babies. It really fucking sucks to drown, but making sure to disapprove of the river while drowning isn't worth much.
Men have harder lives. Women have social safety nets available to them that make them live in a sort of bubble, never really experiencing the worst life has to offer unless they are violently assaulted or something like that. Men on the other hand can often expect to experience how bad life is just in virtue of being regular men. We're disposable, expected to suffer and die. Women always have a second chance, a failsafe, an excuse, etc. The narrative that women have it worse is itself part of this bizarre state of affairs. Part of what makes life hard for men is that it's unacceptable to acknowledge that men have hard lives, unless this is acknowledged in order to service women (patriarchy hurts men 'too,' men are suffering only in the sense that they're complicit in sexist behavior, men need to behave more traditionally feminine in order to be 'saved' from their masculinity, etc.) -- because only the suffering of women is seen to be something 'wrong' by and large. No one cares about men, and no one ever will IMO.
Conrad:
That's not the kind of thing I'm going to say in public, ever (men also can't talk about their suffering, unless in service of women), but I think most of us 'know' this pretty deeply. Men are the 'blue collar' gender, women are the 'white collar' gender. In trying to pass gender boundaries, male-assigned people are more eager to be seen as women than vice-versa, because they are transitioning upward.
Quoting csalisbury
Actually, I have hope -- it turns out that when people settle down and their material circumstances are taken care of, they stop having children, and a stable happy society tends toward a birth rate that's lower than replacement. Antinatalists are only odd in making a practical position everyone seems to hold implicitly, theoretical and explicit.
Huh, yeah, I'm not going to scold you out of political correctness or anything like that, what's true is true, but what you're saying doesn't align with my experience. (I'm particularly confused by the suggestion that men can't talk about their suffering.) Do you have any sisters or many close female friends?
Maybe one day we'll reach a point where everyone is settled down and all their material needs are met and they'll stop having kids altogether rather than reaching some equilbrium. I guess? It seems unlikely to me. And it also seems utterly unrelated to the pain of the antinatalists you mention. Why specifically cite the impoverished, the destitute etc when it seems like the key to antinatalism's success is being happy and well-off? Most antinatalists, imo, want their pain recognized.That's what it's about.
Sure, but I've connected far more with men than women, because I empathize with their struggles more. I think by and large women feel entitled to their lives being kept in stasis by male suffering. And men are okay with that and perpetuate it. It's not about men being angels and women devils -- it's in very large part men's fault that this is how they are.
The best way I can try to put it is this. Men suffer in feeling a kind of existential displacement. They feel fundamentally alone, not at home in the world, and are hurt because deep down they have (and feel like they have) nothing. Women suffer in feeling slights agains their rightful place. That is, they are confident that they have some place in the world and are entitled to the rights that come with it, suffering in reaction to this expectation being disappointed in some way. The world is 'for' women, men just form the plaster that lets them sit in it (with their dead bodies etc.)
Quoting csalisbury
Maybe. I think people would probably have a population panic if the whole world's population was on the decline and try to institute programs to inflate it. But I think no one individually would actually want to bear the burden of having more children themselves (else they'd do it without the programs). I don't know, it all gets pretty sci-fi even decades in the future at this point.
At this point I think it's totally possible that the whole world turns into a third-world hellhole. institutions are more fragile than people tend to think.
Do you think it's possible that you associate this existential displacement with men because you discuss these issues mostly with men?
This is interesting. I think, however, the reason Cioran, Beckett, or Schopenhauer were able to live somewhat normally but still have such pessimistic views on life is because they got used to the reality. Schopenhauer explicitly calls the world a prison. They live lives not of extreme depression but neither extreme elevation - a contemplative and melancholic existence.
The anecdote of Cioran is funny because Cioran, being aware of the problems of existence, was unable to really feel any angst about it because he seemed to have become numb to them. Life will beat you to a pulp, and you either die or survive. Those who survive have to numb themselves somehow. Cioran wishing he felt despair would have allowed him to write more on the problems of the world, the same problems he had become numb to.
There does seem to be a certain tone of romanticism in some of their thoughts, though. The romanticism however seems to be just simply that - a fantastic tragedy meant to entertain by a catharsis. But when life hits you, it's not romantic at all. It's stupid, pointless, and raw. There is no romanticism in despair. There is no romanticism in actual angst. There is no romanticism in intolerable pain. It sucks, plain and simple, unworthy of any aesthetic elevation.
Maybe. But you can see it, IMO, in the kind of art men v. women create. There are exceptions -- Kate Chopin seemed to have 'the gene,' whatever it was, which is why The Awakening pisses off so many women who read it despite being ostensibly feminist. These trends in art were noticed by second-wave feminists -- Valerie Solanas has this great bit on male art that I pretty much agree with, but I still like male art for all that. It's not a perfect correlation, but it's pretty hard to deny. (Actually, I pretty much agree with the radfems on everything).
There's also just the fact that any time a gender-neutral space is set up to discuss this sort of displacement, they become male-domainated, and that the ranks of the disenfranchised, alone, radical, etc. tend to swell disproportionately with men (as do the homeless, dead, and suicidal). So it's hard to tell which way the bias runs. If you ask a woman what she thinks being lonely is, and a man, prepare for very different answers.
We shouldn't diminish this pain, however.
But I consider myself rather pessimistic and have issues with birth, and yet I haven't really experienced anything absolutely horrible, at least nothing that I couldn't internally repress and attempt to ignore. I hold these beliefs because I am acutely aware of the conditions of human existence.
Romantic as this may be, it fails to explain pleasure. Deprivationalism is incoherent. The pleasures of life are not just breaths of air to maintain us from drowning.
Of course many times these pleasures accompany needs. But it's obvious that these are pleasurable experiences in themselves and that there are also pleasurable experiences that are not dependent upon reliefs.
Yes women read him, but not as much, and not in the same way. And many women mock men for reading him because it is a typical thing for a male of a certain age social status and education level to do.
I don't know, most of the women I've talked to describe it a lot like this:
It feels a little like you're conflating fuck-yeah tumblr feminism with women as a whole. I don't like fuck-yeah tumblr feminism either.
No, I don't think so -- nu-feminism is really beside the point, although I think it's more conservative than it lets on, in that the way it plays out is a reflection of old, deeply-held ideas about how the genders do and should interact (woman as victim, man as agent). If you like it's just one passing shape of how these things work. (I like radfems because they tend to be radical as they claim).
But yeah, beside all that I think men and women as a whole see the world in fundamentally different ways. It might be hard to articulate, and of course it has exceptions, but that's fine, it's there. I'm not going to deny the relationships you've had with women who profess these existential anxieties. All the same I wonder if you would admit even a tendency in what I'm saying.
The problem with Schopenhauer's metaphysics, and the metaphysics of any rationalist philosopher it seems, is that it takes the human condition as an example of the entire enterprise of existence. The problems of human existence may be like a pimple on the overall purity of the world.
However, even if we take a naturalistic perspective on this (by naturalistic I mean scientific-oriented, especially in regards to physics...if apokrisis from old PF were reading this thread he'd be having a nightmare), we still need to explain why human existence seems so bad.
It will not do to impose a metaphysical picture of the world that contradicts or does not take into account the human condition. That would mean ignoring the most personal and obvious while being committed to a potentially unknowable doctrine.
Basically, we need to have a manifest image of humanity. We can say that humanity gradually evolved out of other species of organisms. We can say that life is a result of entropy-dissipation. We can say that the universe was created 7+ billion years ago.
But none of these by themselves explains why human existence is the way it is. It does not explain why we feel so much suffering, boredom, angst. So what is it?
I think it's the human mind. Being able to reflect, contemplate, predict, and critically examine things leads not only to a greater ability to survive but a crippling defect as well (Zapffe).
So I think, from a naturalistic perspective, it's not that the world is malevolent or malignantly uncaring, but that some of the residents of the world are aliens to it. This, of course, still begs the question as to how and why these residents became aliens. Which I believe is why Schopenhauer thought the only explanation of this was that life was a kind of cosmic punishment. And we're right back to rationalism.
Of course. Pleasure is contingent upon structural imperfections. But it nevertheless is pleasure independent of the relief it often accompanies. Which is why the river allowing you a couple gasps of air is not a sufficient analogy. Pleasure motivates continual existence, pain forces it.
I think that life's pressures and pains are so pervasive, so obvious, so intense, and so inevitable that whatever pleasures there may be that aren't just reliefs from them are negligible by comparison.
I don't know, man, I think you might be a little depressed and unable to experience pleasure independent of pain. It's inconceivable to you.
I myself am depressed. But I just ate a bowl of ice cream. That was nice. I'm going to a concert tomorrow. That'll be dope. What I'm not currently experiencing is an overwhelming amount of pressure or pain. And if I am, then I'm just kind of used to it and have accepted it as part of my deck of cards. It's really not that bad, but it's not fantastic either.
I have been depressed, but I'm not really right now. I've had highs and lows and I know the former are nothing compared to the latter. I try to keep this in mind even as my temporary psychological state changes. I want a correct philosophical position, not an outlet for my passing urges.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Heh. I doubt it.
No, really, it was good. Chocolate syrup, sprinkles, a banana, all with three scoops of vanilla ice cream. Perfect snack for a hot summer night, only tainted by the ever-present understanding of our existential conditions.
Of course, I take it you are speaking just for yourself here, or at most including others that have avowed to experience much the same 'account balance' as you?
I definitely agree there's an Essentially-Alone/Defending-the-Place-That's-Rightfully-Mine divide. It just hasn't fallen along gender lines in my experience. More along sheltered/not-sheltered lines. It may just be that we inhabit different social milieus. Your schema works when I think about my Waspy paternal grandparents and their circle. My grandpa was ironic, kinda Beckett with a heart and my grandmother was ultra-judgy. But I barely know that world anymore. You may be right in terms of academia too, I'm not sure. Most of the women I've been close too were dis-sheltered early on. I think girls, especially in troubled families, are less protected from the realities of what's happening to mom and dad and the family. But most of the ppl I know are middle class ppl on the margins (wannabe poets and musicians and artists) with little prospect of a Career. None really sheltered.
Quoting csalisbury
I live in academia now, and in my experience it's pretty sexless. Men tend more commonly to have feminine voice patterns and affections, and likewise for women with masculine ones. It's actually pretty jarring to leave back into the 'real world,' you sometimes forget how dimorphic (physically and socially) men and women are outside of the ivory tower. Universities tend to flatten that, which can sometimes be good.
Men very often hit rock bottom -- one of the things in my life that I'm most thankful for has been the way the internet has allowed these men who have hit rock bottom to talk to each other and share these frustrations, so that I can listen to them. Of course, the true rock bottom is where you can't even get on the internet from the public library!
Do you believe there is a 'glass floor?' That's basically what I'm getting at.
Quoting csalisbury
OK, but you pass more homeless men -- far more. Unless you live in a very weird place. I don't deny generalizations have exceptions, fine.
I've felt my share of loneliness in life -- I've gone long periods of time without interacting personally with anyone at all. That said I've always been privileged and thank God for that privilege. I have always had a family, a home to go back to, and enough money to live comfortably. I understand what I experience is just a glimpse of what so many men go through on a daily basis. Yes, women may go through it too -- but not because they are women, in this way. A woman has to either have something horrible happen to her, or be severely physically and/or mentally handicapped or disturbed, in order not to have friends. Normal men don't have friends all the time. That's just how it works. No one wants men, by and large, and no one is going to stick up for them.
Sounds more like a cultural thing than anything else. Men indeed are seen as more expendable than women. But this can be changed, just as the racism of the nation has also been radically changed for the better.
People are still just as racist as they ever were, btw -- and people become increasingly racist as they're forced to live in close quarters with other ethnic groups. I live in Chicago and this city has absolutely disgusting race relations, it's just a foul city.
But not you, right? You're not racist. I'm not racist. Apparently we're not part of the "people".
Wowowowowow this is one hell of a silly thing to say.
There are some women who hate men. And there are some men who hate women. And then there's most people who only hate those who are mean, men and women alike.
There are pretty disturbing convictions lying beneath people's everyday actions. It takes a little prod to bear them out.
No, only some women think this.
And psychodynamic theory is mostly bullshit, especially when done by unprofessionals.
Though I don't like the kind of smug dismissal that implies since something can be psychoanalyzed it's therefore illegitimate. Why can't someone own up to, and defend, their neuroses?
There is a certain phenotype, for example, that likes DFW. I understand, and I think you do too, that you fit that phenotype to a T. But I don't think that's a point against you -- it's just part of a personality.
They can. We usually call that bigotry.
That's fine- it doesn't change much to the fact that time/space is NOT in the world as Will and that is what matters. We can parse Schop's analysis on the the world of phenomenon and the problem still remains. Anyways, the "ground" you name is of the phenomenal- which means that which is the backdrop for world of appearances, thus is part of this side of the coin if you will, and not of the world as thing-in-itself/Will.
Quoting The Great Whatever
But his whole point is that the world is Will AND Representation, and yes, the "first eye" is the world of appearance, where time began, but there was no time before this, but presentation does not just come about on the scene out of nowhere- it is there from the beginning as FLIP SIDE of Will.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Again, it does not apply to the thing itself, it is the FLIP SIDE of Will.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Yes, objects need subjects and subjects need objects- Will "needs" representation, representation "needs" Will. Will does not come "prior" to Representation. Will on its own is a force, yet this force does not "create". It simply does its thing, but its thing happens to be manifesting phenomenon for its own playground of sorts. The playground is the Will, but its other aspect. Though Schop does appear to put weight on Will being primary, it has another aspect which is immediate, and that is the world of appearance. It can't work any other way. There is no time before time where Will is doing this or that such that time and space are created at sub time x. The ground of time is part of Will's other aspect of its own existence. Since he is an idealist, this other aspect is in the minds of organisms. Thus we have Schop's ever present primitive organism. Just as the Will is eternal, so too is the primitive organism, as again the first organism was NOT created at any one point in time, since there was no time before it existed.
Quoting The Great Whatever
You are asserting that I did not mean that it exists in a timeless present. If I did say that, then I will just agree to the language of timeless present. Again, this is the oddity that I find not convincing- the ever present organism.
As for your idea of "veils used to objectify Will", you make it seem like there is a second party hiding the Will. It is all Will, but it is just another aspect of Will. What I think Schop emphasized most was that Will is the hidden aspect that may give us an understanding of what is behind the scenes of the phenomenal. The idea that the phenomenal is actually an illusion only makes sense in the context of the idea that humans may not realize the inner aspect, and take the phenomenal for all there is.
I'm actually kind of digging how two or three disparate threads are woven uncomfortably together right now. I would like nothing better than for this thread to spiral into a giant dissonant mess of overlapping conversations that would make Apokrisis too irritated to enjoy fractals.
It's a tricky thing. You mentioned, justifiably, that anecdotal 'I know a..." accounts don't mean much. I have a whole bundle of personal women-who-self-sacrificed anecdotes but these will, inevitably, be chalked up as exceptions, falsifications, romanticizations.
But the flip-side of that, is how do you defend the idea that women, for the most part, deeply hate men, without resorting yourself to anecdotes?
Does it come down to whoever can rally the most anecdotes for their cause?
Where does your insight into the female soul come from?
Mostly I try to read what people write when they aren't in public and so don't have to save face. That's why I like the internet so much. And I read a lot of feminist literature too.
You're right, I don't really have anecdotes, because I don't (and try not to) spend much time around women. Some people might think that you're in a worse position to judge with less personally at stake. but there's a flip side to that, being too personally invested can make you refuse to see what might be obvious to someone without that investment.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This seems to imply that the will is a 'subject' and the representation an 'object.' But this is wrong, subject and object are both contained in representation, and will is neither. Yes, the subject and object are co-essential. But neither is essential to the will.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It does, in the sense that there is plenty of will without representation (the latter only exists in highly developed organisms), but not vice-versa.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes, but this is not because representation is somehow essential to the will or has been propping it up for eternity, but rather because the will is timeless.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is just wrong, though, both commonsensically and from what Schop. says. Obviously the organism did arise at some point in time, the world of presentation attests to this, and Schop. frequently speaks this way.
Time only functions when the organism is around, but so long as it does, it always retrojects backward to a time before that organism existed. You are confusing things and talking about time as if it were part of the thing in-itself. If you want to talk about time, you can only talk about it via representation, and in representation, time presents itself as preceding the life of the organism, always. And this suffices for the empirical reality of the fact that there was a time before the organism.
Quoting schopenhauer1
A timeless presence is not the same as ever-presence, as if this means the organism is very old or has been there since the beginning. It's just that the subject, as the one that projects time, is itself not temporal.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The language of veils is his, not mine.
That is a fine reading, and I think you are right. His way of saying subject/object is kind of the most "universal" aspect of the phenomenal world.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I agree with this interpretation, except I would not even say "higher". I think even the most basic level organisms may count- but that is nitpicking. The problem I have is right here- that the organism cannot just "come on the scene" because the "illusion" of representation/phenomenal/object-subject distinction then has to "appear on the scene" as well.
We have fundamentally different views about how to account for the illusion of the world of appearances. If we define Illusion as something which is almost a trick (it seems to exist but it does not "really"), then I think that the illusion itself still must be accounted for. If you say that, "It is accounted for! Will makes the illusion, duh!" then you are saying that the illusion is "later" or "after" the Will. This cannot be because after, later, secondary, or what not would mean that there was causality and clearly there is no causality in Will. The only conclusion to resolve this is to say that the illusion was there ALL ALONG WITH WILL, thus in the mind of the ever present organism. This then leads to the odd notion that there is an ever present organism that has the illusion of subject/object which, as I stated earlier just seems odd to me.
Quoting The Great Whatever
This seems simple handwaving and evading the problem purposefully or because you miss my point which I just stated above to your previous quote but will do so again here.
Yes, I understand that time is retrojected backward before the organism existed and only functions with the organism is around.
Yes time presents itself as preceding the life of organism, always.
Yes, this suffices for the empirical reality of the fact that there was a time before the organism.
HOWEVER, the organism itself still has to around for time to be retrojected. The world of time/space/causality and appearances are around only if the organism is around.
The organism is not created at some point x, because that would mean that there was time in an "absolute" sense (the reification of time you discuss) if an organism was created at a particular "x" time. Rather, the organism HAD TO ALWAYS BE AROUND because it could not have been caused. THIS is the odd conclusion. You may not think that there would be an ever present organism, but based on Schop's system, there has to be since time is ideal and not the thing-in-itself.
(Y)
What things have you read on the internet though? You've made sweeping statements about women as a whole (even if that as-a-whole is contingent etc etc) and I'm trying to understand where you're coming from.
Why do you think that?
But, again, what led you to start frequenting these sites?
Sure. But think of all the other unsavory causes that would make this same point. For a non-believer, there's something a little disquieting about this kind of rhetoric
I don't really remember. I've always been attracted to reading about radical political views, and learning about the people that hold them. I like learning about weird people generally, and conspiracy theories and fetishes and that sort of thing.
Quoting csalisbury
Honestly, I think a lot of people are right about a lot of things, even when both sides are in opposition. In civic life you're supposed to pick a side and believe its rhetoric and discard the other, but to an outsider if you dig deep enough they often both start to look right. Often when two groups hate each other, both deserve the hate of the other. Just a heuristic, anyway.
Why do you think that?
The split between men who confront existential displacement with honesty and authenticity and women who don't, who hate and cheat and feel superior - in some ways, this reminds me a bit of that experience I mentioned when I first went to college (in Boston, FWIW.) How everyone else seemed to be on this other wavelength, excluding, getting one another but rejecting everyone else, not really lonely, and how, as you pointed out and I later realized, this was mostly because I hadn't really gotten to know any of them well enough to know what they were actually like.
No, it's fine, and I don't expect everyone to notice or have the same opinions about everything.
Quoting csalisbury
I think men hate men too, and women. I've been told women hate women, but I wouldn't know about that. Men are for the most part happy to be women's useful idiots and bullet shields, so why would anyone stop them?
And sure, I think they're all complex, completely miserable individuals. If you want to get to know them you can find out just how complex and miserable they are. That's what the pathos is all about, being pathetic.
Well, I see I'm being ignored.
As for women not thinking in totalities, I don't know, that' snot something I've ever got the impression of.
Yeah, I'm aware of those statistics. There are a lot of ways to look at suicide. I think it would be interesting to see what the correlation between philosophical pessimism/antinatalism and suicide is. "It is not worth killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late." "I Can't go on, I'll go on." "suicide is a will thing too, you know" Philosophical pessimists tend to be very proud ppl, and suicide is giving in.
I can see how it could come across that way. Thing is, though, I'm quite sure I'd never say something like that in public, or at a party, and I'm not too worried about ingratiating myself to women on here. I think women think in hierarchical terms as much as men do. As far as autism and gender goes - Well, I mean look at the stats. They're not dissimilar to the ones you cited regarding suicide.
I mean, quite simply, that women don't usually seem to devise theories of everything, while a lot of men seem to be drawn to them. Would you agree with that at least?
I don't share that attitude, and I don't think Im an aesthete either. Most days I feel like I want to die, but I know I really shouldn't do it.
Quoting csalisbury
In my experience, women are under the impression that they already understand everything -- and to that extent they feel they don't need to theorize. Men feel empty and try to make sense of the world by imposing something on it. Women don't need to because their place in the cosmos is transparent to them so all problems are already solved just by virtue of their existing, and whatever place & privilege they take themselves to have is the answer. It's really hard to explain. They're always 'on the right side of history' so to speak.
Nah, just kidding :)
Wanting to die every day isn't it. (Especially if you can check it by knowing you shouldn't.)
It's not knowing how not to kill yourself.
I think that's an important distinction.
I think you're wrong about the void and theorizing. Women have the void too (unless they're all lying for attention). They have different ways of coping with it.
You say what you're describing is hard to explain. I don't know, I think I get it. Have you read Edith Wharton's House of Mirth? The word "dingy" comes up a lot, is explicitly treated in a way that makes sure the reader knows they're encountering a bona fide Theme. Dinginess is the creep of that which destroys status. House of Mirth is a fall from grace story. The libidinal hook is what a nice and pure woman and now this is happening. In this sense it's a lot like e.g. Henry James's Daisy Miller, the tragedy of the lady fallen (which uses the same psychic investments, literarily, that, say, kink.com's public disgrace series uses to somewhat different ends.) The thing about HofM, tho, is that it uses this trope as a way to explore desperate placelessness. The language used is rather existential or w/e. Not that different from a sailor lost in heroic dreams who realizes, at a crucial moment, he's failed his ideal and his treasured self-image no longer protects him against the world (Conrad's great theme. It's impossible to really get Heart of Darkness unless you've read Lord Jim. (Seriously, though, if you haven't read Lord Jim, it's fantastic.) )
Csalisbury, I would have thought that it is at least as much to do with testing one's ideas against those of others who share a fascination with the fairly unfashionable practice of thinking.
In any case I didn't mean to cartoonize or otherwise trivialize your or TGW's pain; to do that would indeed be small-minded and arrogant. I haven't read your posts as embodying much of the kind of narcissistic will to universalize own pain as 'life is like this' dogma, that I have found in reading some nihilistic thinkers, notably Cioran and Schopenhauer and even Brassier (Beckett not so much, I have loved reading his novels and the dark comedy there!).
But, yeah, I didn't think you were trivializing anything. If anything, I'm guilty of trivializing in my last response to tgw, which I don't feel great about.
I guess what I wanted to say, but went about it the wrong way, is that in the depth of a suicidal crisis, all the philosophical stuff appears actually comical. The same way, for a dying officer, memories of parlor conversations re: "war is hell" would seem like a bad joke. I believe, firmly, that most pessimists/antinatlists have experienced agonizing pain, but the theoretical stuff is pure sublimation. It's a way of trying to exert power over the bad stuff by judging it. Often there's some peacockish frills involved. True Detective was cartoonish, but there's nevertheless a lesson to be learned from Rust Cohle who evades painful memories and experiences through monologues about Cosmic Threshers etc.
(& yeah there's legit, non-posturing reasons to chill on the forums. I went a bit overboard there.)
Yes, the philosophical stuff very much loses its taste, and begins to appear like sheer wankery, if you are facing terrible loss or death; and that goes for the traditionally anal(ytic) logic chopping stuff, the (in)continental concept-spinning stuff, the bright-eyed stoic-like self-help stuff, as much as the dark despairing self-torture stuff. Well, at least that seems to have been my experience.
I would probably say that the only thing that can help in such cases is an experience genuinely epiphanic, and self-transcending/transformational. Does it matter whether the vision is pagan, theistic or in-between? I don't know why but the first image that springs to mind for me in this context as I am writing this is Meursault in his cell after his abusive rejection and verbal ejection of the pastor who had come to hear his final confession, an utterly calm Meursault looking at the stars and deeply feeling the sublime indifference of the universe. This total lack of feeling remotely nurtured is what brings him to the most complete peace, according to Camus' account. There is nothing of angst (in the sense of dark torment at least) in Meursault's unbounded nihilism.
I wonder if this is a convincing picture of human possibility though, or a case of borrowing the theistic vision while concealing the theistic spirit. Can we find universal indifference genuinely healing? There seem to have been cases: I think of Spinoza, Nietzsche or Hume (although poor old Nietzsche, despite his avid yea-saying, did not end well by all accounts).
Rust Cohle was an interesting case of repressed hurt held under an iron lid, a dark vision of humanity, purposeful self-destruction kept (not always) in check by the most ruthless, yet brittle, self-discipline. But in martial defeat at the hands of a more powerful foe who was possessed by a truly dark and chaotic narrative, and nearly dying, he discovered right at the end (in True American fashion) the all-importance of Love.
TGW is right about the social expectation that women will be protected, whether we are talking women as the property of a man, man as the family provider or feminism's demands on society to give women rights and a place, the work of men is expected to serve women in a certain way not expected of men.
Men are envisioned as isolated agents who command and form the world around them. Women are seen as belonging to a social context, who are served by others or the world around them (and frequently, they are seen to serve it). In some ways this is a myth: men frequently serve other men in a social context, it's just tends to be characterised as an expression of their agency and power (e.g. work of the "free man" ). Likewise, many women aren't given social protection, assuming they lack particular value (e.g. old women, women raped in the serve of male sexual dominance, distain for sex workers, etc., etc.).
Here TGW is really talking about our discourses about men and women. It's more about the suffering, isolation and pain we justify through our valuing of men and women. In this respect, he isn't exactly wrong about, for example, feminism. It is outright protective of women at the expense of (certain) men. The divorced man has no recourse to keeping his former wife. If she wants to leave, he has to suck it up. The male desire for relationship, sex, loyalty and (in some cases) punishment is denied for the protection of the woman's agency. In some cases, the man even loses much of his economic means and freedom (to sure she is not left starving on the street or incapable of providing for children).
Feminism's entire premise is the limit of male action and desire to some degree, to build a society in which women have particular freedoms. In this sense, it does "hate" men: men who break these limits are immoral, are acting in ways which shouldn't exist. Pretty much criminals or monsters, in metaphorical (and sometimes actual) terms. Some of us just think this is more or less good because the notion of isolated people free to do whatever they might want is an illusion with terrible consequences.
[quote = "csalisbury"] Not that different from a sailor lost in heroic dreams who realizes, at a crucial moment, he's failed his ideal and his treasured self-image no longer protects him against the world [/quote]
I think the crucial difference is still there. The sailor's virtue his own. He failed at his ideal. It lacks a social dimension. The "fallen woman" may have failed her own ideals, but she has also lost her virtue in the eyes of society and is now there to by exploited or punished as anyone sees fit.
Put it this way: the sailor who failed his ideals isn't presented, of his own guilt ridden volition, to be publicy and violently fucked by groups of passing strangers.
I think there is a close example with sailors: the responsibility of duty and sacrifice to their fellow sailors, which is considered cause for public shame and retribution. Or even just the wider notion of sacrificing yourself for the community. We've sort of lost that in our individualistic culture though. We tend to consider those failures of individual action rather than of a person's "manhood" and failure to sacrifice. And even these ideas of sacrifice tend to be about men protecting or working for other men, not about men or women in relation to each other. The discourse that women are meant to protect men is still missing.
(I read some poetic or theological something somewhere, a long time ago, which argued that what's hardest for the denizens of Hell are not the tortures endured, but the knowledge that God's love will exist eternally, always out of reach. I think there's something of that too. The happiness of others is hard to bear when you can't join in yourself. But there's some solace to be found in being the least-duped.
Better to reign in hell.
Doesn't he look like a philosopher?
I haven't read The Stranger since high school and it's mostly faded, tbh, so I hunted down a pdf and re-read the ending. I think it probably is a case of 'borrowing the theistic vision while concealing the theistic spirit.' I think it's important that Merseault qualifies the Universe's indifference as 'benign' and 'brotherly.' Plus there's that goofy ultra-french final sentence "For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration. " It seems like Merseault wants to feel like the equal of the indifferent universe. To be cursed, as the universe is cursed, would be evidence of his success. But he can't help familiarizing the universe, just a bit.
But, that said, I think you're right, it comes down to the epiphanic and self-transformational. It's only during moments of crises that you gain authentic insight into how you've been hurting yourself and others. The real mystery, to me, is how you get the strength to go about actually changing. ( I think it probably has to do with trusting others)
And then he pounded a beer, gave himself a tattoo, punched his girlfriend, and landed the sickest kickflip any of us had ever seen.
c'mon man. This is is obviously false, even if you think pain far outweighs joy.
I think you are boiling pessimism down to a trope, which is unfair. Not everything has to be done in a clever little package ala Beckett or otherwise be relegated to taking itself too seriously. Some pessimists are just blunt in their irksome tendency. Now, it doesn't mean it has to go as far as "Life's just a bunch of pain" because as you pointed out, not all moments are agony. However, almost no philosophical pessimist actually asserts this (TGW aside).
Rather, it is a sort of aesthetic outlook. Pessimism is the recognition of the instrumentality of existence. Our world imposes on us our survival needs and unwanted pain in certain environmental and cultural constraints. Our individual wills impose upon ourselves the need to transform boredom into goals and pleasures. Being that we can never have true satiation, we are always in flux and never quite getting at anything in particular.
Most other aesthetics try to do two things: find a meaning in the large or find meaning in small. For the "find meaning in the large" folks, some sort of spiritual or scientific unity somehow acts a solace if asked as an official position. But then they have to live everyday life, which is not unity but the world I described: survival, unwanted pains, transforming boredom into goals flux. For the "find meaning in the small" folks, it is looking at each event as if it was a meditative practice. As long as one focuses only on what is in front of your face, one can distract from the bigger picture. Of course, they too are still going through the same survival, unwanted pains, transforming boredom into goals flux, but as long as they go from small to small, they won't have deal with larger picture.
Interesting, I hadn't really considered this perspective. It seems to lead to the view that something can be worthwhile while simultaneously dependent upon something nasty, leading to a disillusionment. Kind of like eating cake: it's really good, but it's also really bad for you.
Definitely rings true to me, and could be an answer to the thread I recently created.
The strength of pessimism is the seriousness with which it takes suffering and lack of perfection, but it is still only a moment of thought. It doesn't somehow render our moments of joy trivial and pretend. Will can be abandoned, such that someone is content, even as they desire something. The trick is stop thinking one must get anything particular. Just be what you are at any given time.
OK, so the truth doesn't make a good painting or philosophy book. But our suffering is apparently now some sort of art object that needs to be cultivated and wept about in the right tactful way.
Your first statement "I think it's wrong though" makes no logical sense based on the subsequent statements.
You said:
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
It is the larger picture, correct. But it is not "finding meaning" in the large.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
How is stewing in it's own juices distracting us? The very definition of stewing in your own juices is being right in the mix of the thing at hand.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This is either a non-sequitor or a strawman. No one said that pessimism renders moments of joy trivial and pretend. In fact, I started off saying that life is not all agony and that happiness exists.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This sounds like vapid responses "be what you are" "stop thinking one must get anything particular". From what you are saying, you are simply taking the "find meaning in the small" approach. Concentrate on each moment. I already addressed that.
I don't think that's what I meant, or said. There's aesthetically pleasing pessimism (Schopenhauer, early Cormac McCarthy, Beckett, Laszlo Krasznahorkai) and aesthetically displeasing pessimism (Thomas Ligotti, Michel Houellebecq.)
What's bothersome is the sense that actual suffering seems to be grist for the pronouncement of an ultimate truth, for the act of pronouncing, for being one of those who pronounce.
As to doing service to suffering, I really just mean empathy - which isn't empathy unless it attends to the particular. It doesn't much interest me what Schopenhauer says about empathy because he also conveniently theorized a way to separate theory and praxis.
What passes for empathy seems to me to be this aestheticized horse crap, though, which ultimately always finds convenient excuses for why the suffering ought to be perpetuated. Some days I feel that if the empathy was real, the result would just be anti-natalism. 'Oh, I empathize with you, just not in any way that will actually end your suffering, rather than make it a tool for my own values,' and so on. How could an empathetic person have a child? If you're concerned about particularity, focus on that particular act, which has to be done individually by each person. I just can't comprehend thinking that is okay. Forget the abstractions, you're making a concrete decision to actually inflict something unspeakable on something that you claim you empathize with. But then, what does your empathy amount to? As much as Mother Theresa's apparently.
As far as birth goes: I know you've said you have a relatively good relationship with your parents They inflicted an unspeakable horror, and thus must have no actual empathy for you, yet you're concerned not to hurt them. Why's that?
I don't think my life in particular is an unspeakable horror (but some people's are). But it's not great, and birth is literally the source of all bad things that can possibly happen. I don't hate my parents because I think it's not their fault, they didn't know any better. I'm not big on personal responsibility generally, I don't think people have any real control over what they think, do, etc.
I think you've answered your question.
He certainly does! I have an old quarto hard cover Inferno illustrated by Dore on my shelves somewhere...haven't looked at it for years and years...There's something to like about Dore's illustrations.
Quoting csalisbury
That is goofy, indeed; I had forgotten that bit. Yea-saying posturing a la Nietzsche to the max!
When I speak about transformational experiences I always feel that I am somewhat of a phony; I recognize the phenomenological reality of the possibility of transformation, but, when I look at my own life, I feel that I have failed all along to make any real shift towards genuinely caring about anything. I always seem to fail to take the next step.
You're probably right about it having to do with trusting others, which seems for me to be inextricably entwined with trusting oneself. I'm just not sure which one comes first, though; I hope to find out one day...
My hunch is that people don't really value compassion at all, but there's some benefit to signaling that you do. Really, they have other values that they place more highly, which is why they're okay with birth.
Yeah, or at least I think I've said it before. I talk openly about these things if people ask. I'm not that different temperamentally from my parents, maybe more extreme.
They 'like compassion' only and exactly insofar as it aligns with whatever other cultural beliefs that have nothing to do with compassion. What animals it's okay to kill is arbitrary, etc.
I think you could convince people that loving their family was bad, tell them they're on the wrong side of history for it, that it betrays a kind of selfishness and the blindness that makes us prefer closer things, etc. You can get people to believe whatever you want if you get them young enough.
But I think all these things are a matter of habituation without any deeper significance. There might be a sort of higher compassion that stems from the thing itself rather than a convention, through the recognition that pain is inherently bad on its own terms, but I doubt it has a serious presence for people.
You've mentioned, elsewhere, the big deterrent for suicide for you, is the impact it would have on your family. If life is so awful, it's strange you'd be deterred by something you recogize as mere habit and convention.
I don't know if those are reasons. Maybe pleasure is a reason in some sense.
Quoting csalisbury
I don't think it's a matter of looking at what's right and then deciding not to do it because of a habit, but rather the habit itself stops you.
I have a habit of buying coffee every day before work. If Iearned the coffee was made from the blood of orphans, I'd probably stop. So habit in-and-of itself isn't a deterrent. There has to be something more, which makes certain habits more binding (esp when they bind you to constant suffering)
Is that what you mean? Something you have an instinctive aversion or attraction to, yet can't quite put into words? Like the elbow thing?
So we're in agreement that not wanting to put your elbows on the table is no less trivial than not wanting to hurt your family through suicide?
What makes the latter more deeply ingrained? You mentioned conditioning earlier, but I was certainly conditioned not to put my elbows on the table. So it's not conditioning in-and-of-itself.
When we look at animals we don't explain their actions by appealing to choice or personality, because their actions look to us transparently as the result of their (genetic and physical) environment. People are the same way, it's just harder to tell from here.
(There are studies showing that most organisms of a certain complexity act altruistically in direct proportion to the genetic material shared with the object of their altruism. Siblings>Cousins etc. So it might make sense to ditch convention and habit and go straight to biology)
So the thing was the elbows was just that it wasn't of sufficient vintage, basically?
Is it ancientness or trauma that makes hurting family so difficult? Let me put it this way. Say you were abandoned, Quasimodo-style, on the steps of a cathedral. Years later, due to whatever circumstances, you found yourself on the TITANIC (!) with a group of people, and, due to previous displays of whatever, found yourself in charge of lifeboat triage. Some of the people had grown up with you, been dear friends, you drank and smoked together and talked about how much you'd like to get a ticket for the TITANIC (!). And there was the priest who took care of you. And the nursemaid. etc etc. And some of the people you had no relation to. And two of the people, unbeknownst to you, were your biological mother and sister. Or they could be your biological father or brother. In any case. Who would you be more inclined to save?
But, in any case, I think we agree that the desire not to hurt your family, even if condemns you to suffering, seems largely related to their having been close to you, yeah?
It would feel like a rationalization, probably, like with countless other things.
The language that explains what is going on in a phenomenon is never the language in which the phenomenon tries to explain itself. If you want to know what's going on in the world, you don't ask politicians, and if you want to know why someone does something, you don't ask them.
Quoting csalisbury
Most people in the world obviously wouldn't even know if I died, of the few that did, most wouldn't care. The closeness of the family is simply what makes my death cause them suffering int he first place.
But that's the point. The closeness is what causes the suffering. And our closeness to those close enough to suffer is what leads us to prevent that suffering
Say, for some reason, someone out there in Chicago, on campus, who you didn't personally feel close to, felt v close to you indeed. Who knows why, bizzare. And say you were in deep pain, but you knew your absence would make his or her life very hard. Would you suffer so that he or she didn't?
Well sure, I doubt people are literally sensitive to other people's genes. They'd probably be sensitive to outward epiphenomena causally linked to those genes.
Quoting csalisbury
You will always suffer, no matter what. Distance and closeness both cause suffering; everything causes suffering.
Quoting csalisbury
Maybe, but I'd doubt the sincerity of anyone who made that claim.
This may be a moot point at this point, but I'd like to go back to Schopenhauer's idea of time, and my interpretation of this that in order for us to see time as stretching all the way back to the big bang, we have to have an ever present organism keeping the world of representation present.
Yes that came to my mind as well. It seems a bit too basic for Schopenhauer, but that is the only interpretation I can see. I don't see how time comes after Will, because that is presupposing that causes happen "prior" to a certain point, and that would be self-defeating if Will is timeless. My guess is that this might come down to different interpretations of the concept of illusion.
My interpretation is that you must account for the "illusion" as well. Let us say as babies, we have no experience of time, we are closer to pure Will (this is VERY hypothetical), and over time, through the environment's interaction, the illusion of time and representation takes place in our head, along with space, time, qualia (this seems very Dennett like), then you still must account for this phenomena occurring in the first place. There is a phenomena that is taking place which is an illusion of interactions with the environment. Well this phenomenal existence/representations must be accounted for.
[quote=tgw]You will always suffer, no matter what. Distance and closeness both cause suffering; everything causes suffering.[/quote]
?
I was responding to this:
[quote=tgw]The closeness of the family is simply what makes my death cause them suffering int he first place.[/quote]
Sorry to keep talking over you, it's just I don't know what else to say at this point. I sympathize with your frustrations, but you seem to want to find a resolution in Schopenhauer, and there just isn't one there.
[quote=Schop]This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared, this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.[/quote]
But if you agree to all of this, I can't make sense of what you mean by there always having to be an organism from the beginning of time, or why you think this is necessary. Clearly it isn't necessary in the above sense. But if you don't mean this, what do you mean? There is the atemporal standing present, but there are no 'beginnings' of that, precisely because it is atemporal.
As for representation being necessary for the will, there is just no plausible reading of the text that supports that position.
Let's look at the quote that csalisbury picked so we are both referencing the same part of Schopenhauer:
[quote=Schop]This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared, this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.[/quote]
So time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all..
So this I think we interpret the same- consciousness needs to be there in the picture for time to be there.
What we do not agree on is that representation is the flip side of Will. My argument is that representation is part of Schop's reality. All might be Will, but Will cannot create representation because create implies cause. How to solve the dilemma? The representation is right along with Will, being its flip side aspect. This means the organism which it is that representation "adheres" with also needs to be part of the flip side aspect. Will is not alone, but has the partner, representation.
Like I said earlier, my prediction of your way around this is to try to "school" me on what an illusion is, and that representation is an illusion. I tried to say that illusion qua illusion still must be accounted for, as any attempt to justify it coming after Will will only beg the question. Thus, in a way (I am don't remember if he was using it in this context), csalisbury's use of the picture of one hand drawing the other drawing the other.. applies here as Will needs representation needs Will needs representation.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that the consciousness had to be there 'all along' since the beginning of time. In fact if the subject is the transcendental condition for time, that makes no sense. It would once again be treating time as either transcendentally real, instead of ideal, or as some kind of empirical object for the subject to be 'in.'
Quoting schopenhauer1
Representation is only the flip side of some very small parts of will. Most will does not objectify itself, and does not partake in representation at all. Even in representing animals, pleasure and pain, which are at the core of our lives, are not representations at all but direct affections of the will.
But it does. If consciousness is not there all along, how could it "come along" when Will has no "time" prior to the "time-in-consciousness" for there to be such a "first" or "prior to"?
Quoting The Great Whatever
Just see above, same response.
Quoting The Great Whatever
This seems like a TGW interpretation. Using descriptions like "small" is not even applicable to such a transcendental monistic unity such as Will. The only way to describe it would be simply by analogy from analogy from the world of subject/object which is to say the world of representation. You cannot discuss Will as Will. You may only be able to talk about it as to what it is not, but not otherwise positive things other than what we can gleam from what we see from the perspective of a subject to object which is that everything is Will and it strives.
If you're serious about this question there must be something you fundamentally misunderstand about the account. It might help if you laid it out piece by piece. Representation does not 'come along' in time, because time is a form of representation.
Given that, it makes no sense to say that representation was there 'all along' in time, as if time were prior to it. There is an atemporal present in which the subject exists, but since it is atemporal, there's no sense in which this can have been there 'since the beginning,' since beginnings exist only in time.
I really don't know what else to say about this unless you elaborate further on what your issue is. Repeating it isn't helping.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Schopenhauer is quite clear that representation is a function only of animals.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is simply wrong. The way Schop. introduces the notion of will is through our own primitive knowledge of it through our own identity with it, via movements of our body and pleasure and pain. There is no subject/object distinction in these areas, though Schop. does say the form of time remains in some rudimentary form there (this latter point I would dispute, and admit it is my own interpretation, not his).
it is important to rememeber that Schop. thinks we are the thing in itself. For this reason we do not only glean what we can from observation, we also inhabit it.
The subject is atemporal, but so is the subject/object relationship. I hope that sums it up differently. I agree, if beginnings exist only in time, then there was no beginning to the organism that has subject/object relationship. You have to make an account for the representation side of the account.
Quoting The Great Whatever
No, that I agree with, I just don't think you can say more about what Will is outside what we can analyze from the subject/object perspective, as we cannot get outside our own perspective. So you cannot say what Will is, in and of itself other than a few things like "striving" which was gleamed at only through our human subject/object perspective.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I disagree. He we know ourselves as both subject AND object.
I am still trying to figure out where, and whether, we actually disagree on this, because I am having trouble understanding what you're saying.
If by 'organism' you mean the human animal, empirical object in the world, flesh and bones and all, then of course it has a beginning in empirical time, so your position isn't tenable as a reading of Schopenhauer, but would have to be a disagreement with him. The subject has no beginning in time, but (i) that's not because it has been around forever, but rather because the category of time doesn't apply to it, and (ii) the subject is not an animal, but the source of the representational forms.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't know what you mean, you disagree. This is explicit in the text. The subject/object distinction is all part of the world as representation, but we also know ourselves as will, via the movements of our body and the experience of pleasure and pain. There is no subject/object distinction there, and we know the will by being it rather than by observing it. This is in Book II of WWR. To focus on only our view of the world through representation, and the subject/object distinction, is to cut off half of Schop's philosophy and relegate yourself to a Kantian one-sided view that he warns against. The view you present here would be what you would get if you didn't heed that warning and stopped reading after Book I. This latter part of Schop's philosophy is the unique potion that separates him from Kant and other transcendental idealists like Husserl.
Let's look at what Schopenhauer said shall we?:
[quote=Schopenhauer]Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge... The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant's phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself... But the world as idea... only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.
Since, however, it is the most universal form of the knowable, in which all phenomena are united together through causality, time, with its infinity of past and future, is present in the beginning of knowledge. The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past itself is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past. Accordingly the past out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent upon the knowing subject, without which it is nothing. It necessarily happens, however, that this first present does not manifest itself as the first, that is, as having no past for its parent, but as being the beginning of time. It manifests itself rather as the consequence of the past, according to the principle of existence in time. In the same way, the phenomena which fill this first present appear as the effects of earlier phenomena which filled the past, in accordance with the law of causality. Those who like mythological interpretations may take the birth of Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, as a symbol of the moment here referred to at which time appears, though, indeed it has no beginning; for with him, since he ate his father, the crude productions of heaven and earth cease, and the races of gods and men appear upon the scene.[/quote]
The organism must be present for time to be there. We agree on this. We agree that Schopenhauer conceives of Will, which we can make an analogy from by our own subjective willing. However, our disagreement is over how it is time exists at all. Why not just will and no subject/object relationship? I will not even go further and let you answer the question first and go from there, because I think that will be telling as to how this disagreement will unfold.
No, the subject must be. The subject is not the organism, or any worldly object.
Quoting schopenhauer1
There is no reason. You're thinking of the principle of sufficient reason as if it applied to thing in itself. From within the world, we can give reasons as to why certain biological organisms with representational capacities developed. But this entire explanation, and the world itself, is already just an objectification of will. At bottom, will has no reason for what it does. To think otherwise is to make a category error.
I agree yes, but disagree that because (emphasis mine)
And here:
Quoting The Great Whatever
What are you talking about? Explain "already" and "objectification of the will".
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is explained in Book II of WWR.
No, I just want you to get at something you are missing. Will "objectifying" itself, I'd like YOUR interpretation of that notion, not explain to me as if I did not know anything about Schopenhauer.
I didn't know we were talking about 'my' interpretations?
Unless you are quoting directly from Schopenhauer or unless you are a direct conduit as to Schopenhauer's meaning, we are.
As for how I would characterize objectification, it would be: the will without presentation has a kind of unity to it, which isn't the singularity we find in presentation (of being 'numbered' one). This unity is pretty abstract and hard to understand, not well fleshed out in the text. But this unity is one of striving and competition with itself. In other words, the will is internally strife-indicing, fights with itself, injures itself, on its own terms (which we experience as pain). Representation then arises as a way of doing this, by more effectively managing its own struggles, and creating codes, signs, and pathways for trying to satisfy the will by committing these injuries and winning these internal competitions. If you can see where the food is, you can eat and satiate your hunger. This results in a kind of seeing, rather than just a dull experience of hunger, of an object as if distinct from oneself, which acts as a kind of objectified 'unit' that is a kind of guidepost to fulfilling those desires. But, since this 'unit,' the object, is just a kind of bundle of indications as to how to manipulate the will, it is an objectification of the will itself, a kind of crutch that lets the will see how to attack and hurt itself for its own satisfaction. So if I see someone eating, I am seeing the will satisfying itself -- this is how the will reacts to its own processes, with a kind of dull awareness of what is going on with itself, but only through this refracted lens.
All this I agree he pretty much lays out and is not my disagreement. Quoting The Great Whatever
THIS is where we disagree. Representation "arising" just does not make sense. Whether it is Schopenhauer or your interpretation of it, makes little difference to my argument in this case. Schopenhauer cannot have it both ways where Representation "arises", or "emerges" and have an atemporal Will or a non-temporal Will (or whatever way is best to describe this unity). The "arising" must be accounted for itself.
Okay, sure. What can happen, though, is that the will in objectifying itself presents representation itself as arising in time, via presenting biological organisms arising in time who have representational capacities (and a past where there were none). If you like, from the atemporal perspective of the will itself this is a kind of illusion.
Ah, see I told you, you were going to "school" me on illusion :)! This all just seems like getting something from nothing. Your use of the word "arising" as if at point A is will at point B is the world of representation seems a category error as it makes no sense that there is arising in an atemporal unity. Your use of the word illusion as a way to be the final word, when the idea of illusion itself makes no sense when there is just unity. If all is one, there cannot be room for One and Illusion, it is just a meta-version of subject/object, the exact thing you say does not exist. One/Illusion is just a replacement for subject/object and you simply have the same problem with different terms.
It does seem confusing to explain the 'arising' of representation in instrumental terms, since there can be no instrumentality before that arising.
And it makes no sense to talk of strife outside temporality, though we can certainly talk about it outside kantian temporality which is linear and homogenous, analogous to geometrical space.
I got into this a little with csalisbury before, but I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what an illusion is. It's not as if there is a new thing that arises, a second sort of thing, an illusion, that introduces a duality that now has to be explained. An illusion is just the mistaken conception that there is some new thing.
You keep trying to move the goal post but getting at the same problem. Then instead of illusion, you have to account for the "mistaken conception" when there is just Will. You can explain to me it is a result of will fighting itself and still not get anywhere.
All of a sudden you have wrought some sort of ontology of Will that seems more simple escoteric rhetoric. Two Wills don't make a right, they make a "mistaken conception"? I don't think so.
There cannot be misconception. All is Will.
That's what I'm saying!
Imagine if I said, 'there can't be trees -- all is plants.'
I know we went over this above, but, as long as you don't reify illusions, it's perfectly legitimate to ask why the will suddenly wills illusorily, since it never had before.
Well they are contradictory. You are presupposing that there is the misconception in the first place. How can a misconception exist alongside unity? In order to have misconception, you need to have something outside of itself. Well, that is why I say that an interpretation can be that the misconception is simply the other aspect of Will, which means, there is Will and representation as flip sides of each other, not one arising from the other. However, this still doesn't make sense, because then you have that pesky ever present first organism.
Okay, I really don't want to continue this conversation anymore. I'm sorry, I just don't think it will be profitable, given that you're still on this and nothing that I say seems to help clarify what you want or mean.
Oh, I wasn't arguing that closeness generally is the cause of suffering. We were talking about why people, yourself included, are averse to hurting family - in particular, through suicide. I contended it had something to do with compassion. You mentioned it had more to do with convention. We went back and forth about what that meant exactly. But I think we agree, at least, that it has to do with 'closeness.' I think 'closeness' brings us v close to compassion.
It's not that it doesn't clarify, it just doesn't answer it. You keep changing the terms and thinking you are going to get a different result. Will/Illusion.. Will/Misconception.. there is always a dichotomy and not a unity. "No No No" you say.. "misconception is some sort of meta meta, where the Will fools itself that it is itself".. And of course the fact that there is this "fooling itself" in the first place is the very thing to be explained. Will/Will-fooling-itself is still pretty much the same dichotomy of will and representation.
And I acknowledge that, and thus the Will/Illusion dichotomy is ever present.
Well, sure, I agree. True compassion can only occur through letting your guard down. The christian sentimental stuff keeps everyone at arms length - people are all opportunities for a compassion that's the same every time, that has nothing to do with other people.
I think @The Great Whatever thinks I am badly missing the point though. Do you think that is the case? If so, where? If not, where might he be missing the point?
Yeah, that was basically my question, especially how Will changes and evolves into this or that before representation. Do you think his illusion response answers the question or do you think my objections to that response makes sense?
All of the above.
Well, we can say the double aspect of Will and representation goes all the way down. Will is never without representation, which are both atemporal.. How to get passed the ever present organism then? I guess, one can bite the bullet and go the panpsychist route- even forces have a "what it's like to be" aspect, which has the oddity of giving non-organisms experiential qualities. Schopenhauer seemed to endorse this ideas. However, I still don't see it as really solving the problem, because you still have the combination problem of how little experiential qualities bring about full blown representational creating organisms.
Yeah, I thought of the same response after I wrote that. We just have to posit that subjectivity is a brute aspect of matter/energy in pansychism. At least you are not getting something from nothing here since it was there from the beginning.
I rather like the blending of Schopenhauer and panpsychism because it makes more sense. The Will is the flip side of matter/energy. You would still have to account for time and space being in the picture though. At what point is the demarcation between pre-representational and post-representational objects/organisms and when does this demarcation take place? If we say "point x" then that point x has to be accounted for as to why it's different than the point right before x.
I don't know that there would be a distinct point x. I guess it's something of a sorites paradox. What's a heap? What's 'representation'? When do creatures see? Is it when they first develop photoreceptive cells?
Yes I agree. We cannot even say "develop photoreceptive cells" as we'd have to qualify when "develop" happens and what that is even like before "develop". There is always that odd jump to before consciousness to consciousness that does not add up.
Representation is not atemporal, though.
A simple answer: it doesn't (change, evolve, etc)
Strikes me as a cheap answer, tbh. Yeah, maybe the will in its essence doesn't change, but the way in which that essence manifests changes and evolves a whole bunch - and that before the purported birth of world-as-idea. I can cite some WWR passages?
Yes, I wasn't saying in Schopenhauer's conception, this was in my own conception. I was trying to solve a conundrum that I see in Schopenhauer as far as I interpret it. How can representation "arise" when there is no causality in Will? That is to say it doesn't "arise" (at least not in the common sense notion). Rather, it is always there "with" will in that there was not point "x" when representation started.
That seems to capture the spirit. I hope you don't mean to suggest that something can't change if its essence remains the same. That seems like a very confusing path to go down. Maybe it is what you mean though.
A strange distinction. There is no essence of the will.
The strange distinction I perceived you to make above was that the will has an essence. It doesn't.
Is, has, idk - It's strange to me that the essence thing made perfect sense to you in one context, but not in another.
Anyway, feel like we're still back at the same spot. The will changes, evolves, takes on all sorts of forms, before organisms capable of representation come on the scene. And that doesn't make much sense, if there can be no time without representation. Yet that's precisely what Schop suggests.
You literally just admitted that it didn't.....................
Does the will take on different forms?
Does taking on different forms imply change?
Expand on this statement.
Does the will manifest itself in different ways? (This is almost rhetorical. I know you've read WWR)
ok, objectify works for me too
What are you trying to say?
Does the will take on different forms?
Does taking on different forms imply change?
If by this you mean the objectification of the will, then no.
Again, the thing is Schop explicitly discusses the will affirming itself in different ways before the debut of representation-forming animals.
If the will affirms itself in different ways, then there is change. And somehow, for Schop, there's change before time. Which doesn't make any sense at all (though you can paper it over with vague generalities about the will and atemporality which ignore the problem altogether)
Yes! This is exactly the point I am trying to make in the Illusion thread.
Yes, as he is obliged to do when taking an objective perspective. No one apparently read my comment at the beginning of this thread. Transcendental philosophy employs a strange loop structure, whereby one starting place leads into another and vice-versa. In the present case, there can be no object without a subject and no subject without an object. They mutually presuppose one another, such that empirically speaking, the horizon of our knowledge extends back to the big bang and follows a sequence in which inanimate matter is formed, then single-celled organisms, then multicelled, and finally representation-forming organisms. Yet from a transcendental perspective, the knowledge of this whole history of objects depends upon a knowing subject, without which, nothing can be said to exist.
Hence the oddity of an ever present organism.. If all is Will, and there is nothing but Will, the organism for which representations exist such that time exists must also always exist as causality itself cannot exist before representation (which only organisms apparently have).
The account Schopenhauer gives, of the will objectifying in different grades, is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a mere 'empirical' account, describing the change of matter in space. He explicitly presents it, in BOOK II, as a narrative about the will itself, striving in this way, then that, battling itself in ever more complicated ways.
What I'm saying is that book II presents a narrative about a pre-representative will striving, expressing itself, in ever new and more complicated ways. It explicitly discusses this as a progression.
ok. My point is only that book II presents itself as the true account of the will's adventure and it does so in terms of a striving that grows in complexity as it clashes with itself. It doubles down on progression. It seems like an exceptionally bad metaphor for something that has nothing to do with change, progression or time.
Existence itself is metaphorical for Will. But there is still Will and Metaphor (representation). What I fear is that Will is being used as a magical device that wipes away the problem. Will is atemporal/ aspacial striving. The existence we are used to is that of representation.. temporal/spacial/causal there is a subject for an object. Things arise in this side of things, things don't arise on the Will side of things. You can only maintain this if we lose the idea of "objectifying" because Will- being aspacial and atemporal does not do "causality-like" things.. this is what @csalisbury is getting at.
Truth be told, everytime Schopenhauer starts talking about the indivisible unity of the will, outside the principium individuationis, I get the sense he's not really sure himself what he's talking about. It's basically a somber and confused oscillation between negative theology and ontotheology. The diversity of the world, its conditioned multiplicity, must, its felt, rest on some unified unconditioned (Why? this is the ontotheological impulse accepted unquestioningly). But how's the unity of something inherently eristic supposed to work? What does that even mean? Well...(& then we get the negative theology)
Yeah, there are some assumptions where it might not be explained very completely, especially about unity of Will. As you stated, he uses a negative theology of sorts to get at the notion that if things are not individuated in space/time then they must be this unified whole I guess and apparently it strives and objectifies, but in some metaphysical sense that is not in space or time, so it is kind of like a sublime striving and objectifying.. which seems like a square circle or something.
So how would you tweak Schopenhauer? Is will individuated all the way through? Is there even will? How does evolution, entropy, the Big Bang, subjective experience, and all of science fall into this? Real easy stuff.
See, here I think you must not understand or agree with the intuition that Schopenhauer is trying to communicate about the will. The existence we are used to, or to be fair, the existence I am used to and find confirmed in Schopenhauer's philosophy, is that of a certain feeling, called willing, which is prior to and more basic than representing. The will is just a word abstracted from the feeling of the present moment, which is strictly incommunicable. I can only communicate and have knowledge of my will in time, in terms of distinct acts of will that I perceive after they have occurred, but as for sheer willing itself, this "occurs" in the timeless present, and this timeless feeling of willing or striving Schopenhauer simply calls the affirmation of the will to life, since what is known to be willed after the fact (i.e. in time) is life or representation.
No, I get it. That was a very good explanation of Schopenhauer's Will and its relationship to representation. Actually, I think I am going to quote you to answer @TheWillowOfDarkness in the "Mind is Illusion" thread as it is a very succinct but thorough summary.
Anyways, the part I am having trouble with is the dichotomy of the atemporality of Will and the presence of time/space in representation. Will is atemporal and representation at least has the appearance of time/space etc. The problem is when Schop talks about Will objectifying itself, as Will does not do "causality-like" things. To quote myself again:
Quoting schopenhauer1
In other words, time/space/the world as representation cannot come AFTER some originary period where all is Will. That makes no sense if Will is temporal and there is no before/after (and thus no causality). Rather, space/time/ the world as representation must "exist" (words do no justice here) right along side Will. It was there all along doing its time/space thing. However, that is a conundrum because time obviously has a beginning- which according to Schop happens with the first representing-making creature (something about "first eye opening" as a metaphor). Since time/space must have always been there (as there is no before/after as stated earlier), and since that occurs with first organism, there must have been an ever-present organism where time/space can always exist.
I know this might be muddled. If you need me to try to do a premise, conclusion thing, let me know.
Quoting schopenhauer1
He does say that willing is causality seen from the inside, so to speak, though this is to speak metaphorically. As you know and have said, the only legitimate application of this concept is in relation to the world as representation, wherein physical bodies interact with one another in space and time. However, one of these bodies is my own. With all other objects, I know them superficially, but my own body I inhabit and know interiorly, which is to say, I know it as it is in itself, not merely as it appears. What is my body subjectively in itself? Not an object but a will, which then provides the key to understanding what all other objects are in themselves. The will, moreover, only wills one thing as a timeless act of will: life. The knowledge of distinct, individual objects and acts of will is, therefore, ultimately illusory.
In willing life, so too does the will simultaneously will knowledge of itself, the miracle par excellence as Schopenhauer calls it. Why is it a miracle? Because there is no reason the will should become aware of itself since the will has no reason for its existence to begin with. When you said that the PSR only applies to representations, not to the will itself, you were absolutely correct, but the will can still be and is the logical ground of representation. So we can ask: what grounds representation? The answer is the will. If we then ask what grounds the will, the answer is nothing. The will is groundless.
Being the reason or ground for something is not to be its cause. Reasons and causes are different things. Hence, the will did not and does not paradoxically cause representations to exist at some primordial point in time when a particular organism came on the scene and became self-conscious. It is rather the ground for the world as representation's existence. This is why what Schopenhauer is doing is called metaphysics and not physics. He's seeking a rational, philosophical explanation for the existence of the world, not a causal or physical one. This isn't to say the latter are not legitimate modes of explanation, however. The story we can tell about the evolution of inanimate matter, to simple celled organisms, and then to more complex forms of life is a perfectly legitimate explanation for our existence, but it's not the only one and is one-sided. So from this empirical perspective, it is true to say that the "first open eyed" organism is necessary in order to account for the world as representation, but only from this limited perspective.
This is why I made a separate thread about illusion. The "knowledge" part- the "illusion" has to be accounted for. It "exists" in some way. This illusion has been around since the first organisms according to Schopenhauer. Being that the illusion cannot come about at time "x", it has to have always been there (along with Will or as part of Will). Thus, the odd conclusion is there is an organism that was always there along or as part of Will. I know it is odd, but I am just taking the logic to its full conclusion.
So the will is never at variance with itself, it's only the manifestations of the will that are at variance with one another? Is that right?
Yes, I quite agree that it's odd, or mind-bending as Wicks put it in that one comment about strange loops I made. It's really just a consequence of transcendental idealism. If you feel it's not merely odd but false or contradictory as well, then I don't know what else to say, as I don't find that it is for the above reasons.
I am always myself. Where I do these begin or end? We can't really say where. One does not live to experience their conception. Nor does one experience there death. In the being of representation, there is no beginning or end. While existence may begin or cease, no instance of being does. I be and never do anything else. So does, from their own subjective point of view, anything else in the world. Even the rock, in terms of its own presence, never gets to experience its beginning or its end. It's either not yet there or ceased to be.
The distinct act of description (often termed "third person," though "first person descriptions are the same) is always accompanied by being which has no beginning nor end. Every moment of existence is "timeless" so to speak. A moment which is never captured by any other, no matter how much is known about it.
Schop almost understands this in Will. It a much better handling of the infinite expression of finite states than found in some other philosophy, such as that which suggest that humans have power over such expression. He's still doesn't quite grasp it though, for he views it as a consequence of representational experience (a state of space-time) rather than understanding it as a thing-in-itself. He's still thinking of the infinite in terms of space-time. Supposedly, it needs us (or the ever present organism) to be. He's given it a beginning (life) and an ending (death) when it doesn't have one. Not even in us, for we don't be at conception (we are yet to be made) or in death (we have ceased to be).
How can this empirical perspective (causality) be brought in if Schop is only interested in logical expression (reasons)? Moreover, how can there be an account of the world as representation (empirical) without making this category error? In either case, it is to be suppose Will must be given by space-time, by a state of the "first open eyed" organism.
I sort of see where your going, but you are going to have to lay down a more explicit explanation for your own point of view in contrast to Schopenhauer and in the simplest terms possible.
eh, sure - think we lost the plot for tepid niceties but this thread's toast anyway
I didn't! Your claim is that Will cannot "do" things in causal like-fashion. If the world of appearances are an illusion, then the illusion must be accounted for. The appearance of it exists, and therefore something outside of Will exists (but how can this be if everything is "actually" Will!!). One way around this is that both the world of will and appearance are flipsides of each other- one did not "arise" out of the other (or otherwise fall into the fallacy of attributing causality to Will). Schopenhauer1's nuance was that the odd conclusion that comes from appearance being the flipside of Will, would be that an ever-present organism would have to exist in order for the world of appearances to not just "arise" from nowhere but always persist (as it cannot just come on the scene at any point in time "x"). Maybe that will set the gears going again!
With respect, I don't think you've shown how it doesn't make any sense, at least to me.
Yeah, idk man, one can only take so many 'language itself is metaphorical' type responses before it stops seeming worth it.
Yeah, so this is exactly the kind of response I'm talking about.