/lit/ - Literature

>>8633892

> So we must take t[w]o positions regarding ourselves: our intellects are biologically determined phenomena and yet the precondition for knowing that they could be such.

But also the precondition for *being* such, and this seems to be the potential fatal contradiction. In ither words, as I just posted a minute ago

> A transcendental realist could maintain that consciousness is necessary for the recognition/discovery of this process while not being necessary for the existence of this process - but Schopenhauer, as a transcendental idealist, of course has to say that consciousness is necessary for the very existence of the process also.

> this whole historical account is still only empirical, at the level of phenomena, and as such presupposes the very intelligence it seeks to account for

>>7516283
>>7516622

Schopenhauer is known for preserving most of Kant's theoretical machinery, but is especially relevant to your interest for writing On Vision and Colors early in his career. Despite being a staunch Kantian regarding the ideality of space and time rather than their reality as things-in-themselves, Schopenhauer puts forward a model of how reflected light in external space passes through the pupil, how this stimulates the retina into a physical activity that the brain registers as a spectrum of colors, how the understanding brain reorients the resulting image from the inverted original produced by the eye's lens, how the two eyes cooperate in producing spatial perception and depth of field; also how, supposedly, mere sensory feelings of irritation on your palm would be unintelligible - and could thus never be experienced as a rope sliding through your closed hand - without your mind already having space and time and causality like a pre-programmed ordering formula to impose coherence on those sensations; and other penetrating, if sometimes outdated, pieces of specific everyday evidence in support of his broader philosophy of perception.