/lit/ - Literature

>>22644795
Brainlet here. What if the Shopenhauer's will is just an "instinct to survive" ?

>>22644795
Look at your hand and intentionally wiggle your fingers. What your eyes/brain are perceiving as your fingers wiggling is a phenomal representation. But at the same time, you have a direct insight into your will moving your fingers. That thing you are "feeling" (for lack of a better word) as Will is not a phenomenon, it is a thing in itself, and the whole world is made out of that.

>>22644858
Took me some time to wrap my head around this.
so, to oversimplify, the representation is the input and the will is the output.

>>22644795
I'll allow a more well-informed anon correct me if necessary but from what I understand, Schopenhauer's philosophy is a combination of Kant's philosophy and Eastern spirituality. Kant came to the conclusion that external reality exists solely in our minds, and there's a layer of reality called the noumenon which our minds can't access, but still gives rise to all we experience. Eastern spirituality (Hinduism and Buddhism) is centered on the elimination of desire because desire leads to suffering and teaches that the physical world is an illusion you must overcome by resisting bodily impulses.

Schopenhauer was a student of Kant and thought that the noumenon was something called the Will which was responsible for all desire. So behind the veil of the world's appearances is this all-powerful force which manifests itself in the writhing, seeking, fighting things of this world. I remember in his book he says that the Will is the thing that splits up the representation into parts which are desirable, frightening, lust-inducing, etc. And that the body is the Will as it manifests in the representation. But honestly I would recommend reading the book itself. For philosophy it's pretty readable and doesn't require any background reading although he says you should know Kant.

>>22646317
> but still gives rise to all we experience.

Fichte refutes this by saying causation is phenomenal and so how can we know the Noumena causes the phenomenal of causation belongs to the phenomenal

>>22644795
Don't bother Schoppy Joe was retroactively refuted by the phenomenology and veritable Hegel

>>22644795
the whole point of making a metaphysical claim about substance is that it's literally real...
Maybe read the book so you get a real answer and not some tangentially related snippet

>>22646759

All we know is that there is an object and subject. The subject did not create the object. Therefore God. We exist as God's idea. Matter is the presentation of actualization of potential. Unobserved "matter" is just potential. It is not actualized until actualized by mind.

Then you realize that it doesn't matter (no pun intended). This is our reality. We can't get "beneath" it. So then you must turn to ethics for "what to do with it."

The only ethics that makes any sense is natural law. So there you go.

>>22647771
Are you ripping off Berkeley?