The Universe is EVERYONE's will

You are conscious of the external world, spread out and unfolding across space and time; this kind of consciousness includes your view of your own body and your knowledge of all the other corporeal sensations of your physical self.

But you can also be conscious of your embodiment "from the inside," what it's like to be pained or gratified by the things that happen to your body, the private experience of desiring the things that you desire, of fearing the things that you fear, of being angry or joyous or bored. These are representations of inner sense rather than of outer sense, so they are known temporally rather than in time and space; each person has this kind of parallel consciousness of only one thing - their own individual body - and it's a source of knowledge that no other person has access to (except in excetional cases, such as some paranormal states of mind).

>Can someone explain to me what the fuck is meant by "Will"?

It's the interior of physical appearances, like the inside of a glove vs. the outside of it. You have special double-access to your own body as both a physical appearance and a subjective experience, and from this double-access Schopenhauer infers all other physical appearances in the world have a subjective interior, including objects we normally assume aren't anything more than their physical appearance like the Moon.

The object of your outer consciousness is the spatial world that includes your body; the object of your inner consciousness is your own will. Your individual physcial body is the objectification, the objective correlate, of your individual willing; your bodily movement towards an apple is not caused by your desire for that apple, or vice versa, but rather your bodily movement *is* that desire, known from the outside rather than from the inside, known objectively rather than subjectively. Even your physical appendages and organs are each the visibility of the basic urges and instincts that constitute your inborn nature as a human; your hands manifest your will-to-grasp, your mouth and gut are the appearance of your will-to-feed, your genitals objectify your will-to-copulate.

And if you could have this special knowledge of all individual objects in the universe, you would find that each object is also an inner locus of willing. Even plants and inorganic beings, despite having no intellect of their own, are nonetheless appearances of, say, an individuated will-to-flower, or will-to-roll, and if they had intellects they would know their own subjective inner states as we know ours. Wherever there is activity, motion, growing, decaying, force of any kind - namely, wherever there is physical existence - there is an inner, individual willing that does not appear in space; an "inside" that could never be reached by peeling away spatial layers.

On to the second sense of "will" soon.

how soon?

Based Mads.

Utilizing energy in order to act.

In the second sense, "will" means thing-in-itself; it refers to the concept "being that is independent of space and time, and independent of the opposition between knowing subject and known object." Such a being would therefore be impossible for us to experience or even imagine. But it's still legitimate for us to employ the concept carefully, because it's possible to ask the question "what is existence apart from being my mental representation?"

The closest we can come to answering this question is to consult our inner self knowledge, to consult the will (in the first sense) we each individually know. Our introspective consciousness of our willing is represented in time, so it is not knowledge of any thing-in-itself; but since it only involves time, while outer knowledge involves space too, our inner knowledge is "closer" to the thing-in-itself. The premise is that the thing-in-itself is more directly displayed, is less shrouded, when it manifests in one form of representation rather than in two.

So because the closest you can come to knowing the thing-in-itself is your knowledge of your inner willing, you can think of the thing-in-itself as a non-temporal version of what you find in yourself: striving, urging, willing. Such will-in-itself, again, cannot really be imagined - how can you form a mental image of experiencing something that is not spatial or temporal? How could the object of your consciousness be a thing that's totally independent of the differentiation between subject/object, knower/known? You can't - but you can still use the concept of will-in-itself to maximally explain your inner empirical nature and the character of the physical world, in something like an inference to the best explanation. The unending toil of the universe (visible in intelligent and non-intelligent beings alike), and the insatiable craving of your individual will, are best understood as the manifestation of a single, non-spatiotemporal restlessness.

Stop.

There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties"; for instance, "I think," or as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, "I will"; as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as "the thing in itself," without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involve a CONTRADICTIO IN ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words! The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say to himself: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible

Causality stands as the "human" truth. With or without human perception this universe is but nature itself

>as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as "the thing in itself,"

Seems like a severe mischaracterization of his philosophy. Schopenhauer's system does not require, and in fact clearly argues against, the possibility of knowing a thing-in-itself. Are you maybe defining "thing in itself" in a different way than him?

> without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object.

How would either the subjective element of consciousness or the objective element falsify any proposition/concept, except empirically? Schopenhauer's project involves transcendental philosophy in this context, deeper than empirical - so maybe your contention is with such a project.

...

>I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involve a CONTRADICTIO IN ADJECTO

Repeat it zero more times for all I care. I'm interested in arguments and explanations much more than mere repetitions. Where is the logical contradiction?

> we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words!

Like the ones you're using now? Is your linguistic communication just a tool you're now using to eventually stop speaking with humans? Communicating in some other way instead?

> the philosopher must say to himself: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible

And that thought itself takes the form of a sentence, no? We're investigating the most basic concepts/perceptions we have consciousness of, and our sources of certainty for those knowledge claims; you say* that logical proofs/rigid rational arguments for these propositions aren't really to be expected - suggesting what, though? That pure formal logic is the only source we have of knowledge? That what humans know is limited to propositions, representations of language, and the logical relations of their component concepts? Do you have refutations for Schopenhauer's repeated arguments, where he insists that sensory perception, spatiotemporal experience, is more basic than abstract, conceptual, linguistic, rational knowledge? Or against his arguments that it's at this level of sub-rational knowledge that our empirical consciousness of being an individual, embodied, introspective self occurs?

*Though maybe your goal - if it could be coherent for you to have a goal - is not to provide arguments, but only to claim some kind of absolute skepticism. In which case I respect your commitment, despite your continued communicating and logically inferring.

Then logically doesn't killing people make parts of the universe disappear?

Schopenhauer does say that if a living body - or if any physical object, no matter how miniscule - could be absolutely destroyed, then the rest of the universe would be obliterated along with it. What he means is that to annihilate an individual thing would be to not only cause the non-existence of its objective structure and the correlate will within - it would be to annihilate the thing-in-itself too, since the thing-in-itself is presupposed by the physical existence-as-representation of the individual thing. An individual being in nature *is* the will-in-itself known in this particular phenomenal way by this particular phenomenal intellect; no real differentiation can be made, only conceptual differentiation.

But Schopenhauer also argues that such absolute destruction of an individual object/will is impossible.

When a person dies, via homicide or not, their individual personality and intellect cease, but not because their body, or their body's inner will, has been annihilated; there is no such annihilation, but rather a dissolution of the physical componenets of the body. The chemical, electrical, thermal, and mechanical forces of the corpse, all formerly subordinated and unified into the person's life force, are free to scatter through nature. And with every physical aspect of this decomposition, and what's generated newly from it (like the fungal or bacterial life proliferating with the body's decay, or new chemical compounds and mineralizations that result from it), there is a correlated subjective aspect, a correlated inner willing.

Interestingly, though these arguments of Schopenhauer's were designed to avoid the problem you asked about, they seem to generate a different problem for his system. He says elsewhere that for an individual human to deny the will-to-live is for that person's individual will to contradict its own nature and annul itself. This is holiness, and upon bodily death such a person's individual will is not objectified as a new body, since that individual will has been extinguished - yet somehow without the annihilation of the noumenon and all its phenomena. Schopenhauer acknowledges this apparent incompatibility, but doesn't do much to resolve it, except to basically say that it's a mystery that lays at the innate limit human knowledge.

I too played Xenoblade

>Causality stands as the "human" truth. With or without human perception this universe is but nature itself

Sounds like, Schopenhauer would argue, a "naive" realism about the external world. Are you saying that the physical universe exists independently of being perceived?

The universe itself is an act of freedom; it is the domain of causality, so does not itself have a cause; sufficient reasons can be given to explain things within it, but no sufficient reason can be given for the universe itself. As something not determined by any cause, not necessitated by any ground, the universe is free in the fullest sense - just like the blind, omnipotent freedom of the thing-it-itself whose manifestation the universe is.

- S

Exactly my point or, how I selfishly view it. I hate to think our consciousness makes this universe a mere reality.
I cannot bring any argument to it, but neither does the universe need us nor enjoy us in some way.
I strangely believe we (humans) are an anomaly, which by definition makes us think we are superior to nature, mostly because of our own conscience.
I digress, but we need to believe the little lies so we can believe the big ones. Thus I do not fully convince myself with this post but really we tend to give humanity to much value

Ironically this is something I agree with. The universe is free/freedom. We will never be. Thus we unsuccessfully try to understand what we cannot conceive and not why it is/will always be out of our grasp