In "The World as Will and Representation", section 6, he says that the world of appearances is dependent upon the first observer. However, this observer is also dependent on the world, since a chain of phenomena dictated by causality created him.
This antimony is resolved by saying that "time, space and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its appearance of phenomenon, of which they are the form."
However, before the first observer, there weren't appearances, just the things-in-themselves, since there was no observer. How can you then say that causality created the observer, if the things-in-themselves don't obey causality?
Also, how do the things-in-themselves behave, if they don't obey causality?
His answer to the antinomy does not resolve the problem at all. Well noticed (even though it is absolutely silly that the problem is so little mentioned among readers). It is a notorious problem in his philosophy, for which Schopenhauer offered no more than a pseudo-solution (the one you mentioned).
Mason Moore
Has anyone else (Nietzsche?) proposed a solution without changing the whole system?
Samuel Roberts
There is no satisfactory solution except for modifying Schopenhauer's conception of the world as will, for it remains inconceivable that something could come into existence out of a world devoid of time, space, matter and causality (i.e. the world as will). Nietzsche is in fact one of the earliest to acknowledge the problem: cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521855846&ss=exc (point 4).
Juan Ross
>it remains inconceivable that something could come into existence out of a world devoid of time, space, matter and causality
You mean a universe or 'plane of existence' surely.
Jackson Diaz
>However, before the first observer, there weren't appearances
This is correct. Those appearances (such as the geological activity that created the earth) are purely hypothetical: they are what an observer would have seen if one had been present at the time. If you could teleport to the edge of the universe and intercept the light traveling outward from Earth as it formed, you could observe and verify that hypothetical process.
There is a double aspect to all things: will on the one hand, representation on the other. The will precedes representation as the thing in itself. When the will 'creates', that is mirrored outwardly in representation as an effect which has proceeded from a definite cause or ground. But that causal nexus belongs only to the phenomenal side of things, not to the numenon.
Wyatt Smith
Yes
Gabriel Thomas
"Schulze's critique of Kant is essentially the following: it is incoherent to posit as a matter of philosophical knowledge — as Kant seems to have done — a mind-independent object that is beyond all human experience, and which serves as the primary cause of our sensory experience. Schulze shares this criticism of Kant with F. H. Jacobi, who expressed the same objection in his essay, “On Transcendental Idealism” [1757], five years earlier. Schulze argues that this position illegitimately uses the concept of causality to conclude as a matter of strong epistemological requirement, and not merely as a matter of rational speculation, that there is some object — namely, the thing-in-itself — outside of all possible human experience, which is nonetheless the cause of our sensations.
Schopenhauer concurs that hypothesizing a thing-in-itself as the cause of our sensations amounts to a constitutive application and projection of the concept of causality beyond its legitimate scope, for according to Kant himself, the concept of causality only supplies knowledge when it is applied within the field of possible experience, and not outside of it. Schopenhauer therefore denies that our sensations have an external cause in the sense that we can know there is some epistemologically inaccessible object — the thing-in-itself — that exists independently of our sensations and is the cause of them.
These internal problems with Kant's argument suggest to Schopenhauer that Kant's reference to the thing-in-itself as a mind-independent object (or as an object of any kind) is misleading. Instead, Schopenhauer maintains that if we are to refer to the thing-in-itself, then we must come to an awareness of it, not by invoking the relationship of causality — a relationship where the cause and the effect are logically understood to designate different objects or events (since self-causation is a contradiction in terms) — but through another means altogether. As we will see in the next section, and as we can see immediately in the title of his main work — The World as Will and Representation — Schopenhauer believes that the world has a double-aspect, namely, as “Will” (Wille) and as representation (Vorstellung).
Schopenhauer does not believe, then, that Will causes our representations. His position is that Will and representations are one and the same reality, regarded from different perspectives. They stand in relationship to each other, in a way that compares to the relationship between a force and its manifestation (e.g., as exemplified in the relationship between electricity and a spark). This is opposed to saying that the thing-in-itself causes our sensations, as if we were referring to one domino striking another. Schopenhauer's view is that the relationship between the thing-in-itself and our sensations is more like that between two sides of a coin, neither of which causes the other, and both of which are of the same coin and coinage."
Jackson Collins
The activity of the Will is inscrutable. This is Schopenhauer's x. What Schopenhauer improved upon from Kant was giving the thing in itself properties through negation. He inverted the properties of representation (time, space and casualty) to arrive at the properties of thing in itself, which Kant of course had to leave as an undefined x
Lucas Sullivan
Only reasonable answer is that the world of appearances doesn't depend on the observer and had nothing to do with the first, nth, or last observer of whatever phenomena.
Prove me wrong.
Protip - you can't.
Leo Evans
Can someone explain exactly what Schopenhauer's thoughts on death are? It's not clear to me. It sounds like he is saying that death sends you back into some cycle of willing, but denial of the will is a permanent quietude? How does it work?
Xavier Reyes
After death you will be what you were before conception.
That is to say, nothing.
Angel Hughes
>Schopenhauer's thoughts
Ethan Howard
Less 'nothing', more 'disindividuated'.
Angel Bailey
That's a more or less exact quote.
Life is a brief, disturbing episode in the eternal repose of nonexistence, etc
Noah Baker
You weren't nothing before conception. What you were (and are, and will remain eternally) is in the title of his magnum opus. You haven't read it, have you?
Anthony Martin
I've read both volumes in the original German you daft fuck. Your self-consciousness, your individuality, was nothing, it did not exist. Everything with a beginning needs must have an end. Insofar as you are representation, you are mortal and temporary. nsofar as you are Wille, you are immortal and eternal.
Nicholas Reyes
Could you please provide quotations from the relevant passage. I just read through all of section six and there is nothing about a 'first observer', nor is there a proposed resolution to 'this antimony'.
I am reading from the Cambridge edition Judith Norman's translation.
Colton Myers
This is a much better answer. You can see why, can you not?
Jordan Allen
It's actually section 7, there's a typo in the original post.
Lucas Gutierrez
look man this is Veeky Forums, I don't expect shit from you and you shouldn't expect shit from me
Anthony Cooper
This is the answer, and it's right there in section 7:
>The contradiction that in the end is necessarily raised here can however be resolved because (in Kantian terms) time, space and causality do not belong to things in themselves but only to their appearance whose forms they are. >IN MY TERMS, the objective world, the world as representation, is not the only SIDE of the world, but, as it were, the EXTERNAL side of a world that has a completely different side in its most interior being, its kernel, in the thing in itself. We will consider this other side in the next Book, calling it 'will' after its most immediate objectivation.
Schopenhauer isn't my specialty, and I think he really takes the basic Kantian framework well beyond its suitable application, BUT: there is a very common misunderstanding to construe the term "objective" as "really real" or "ultimate" or what have you, when it (simply, or not so simply) denotes "objectivity" in the sense of some *thing* that has mathematical, that is, spatio-temporal determination. This determination is necessarily dependent upon some cognizing being, as the world doesn't perform math upon itself, it doesn't take itself as an object--it just *is*.
Ayden Gonzalez
Or, as Schopenhauer puts it continuously throughout WaWuV, there is no "objectivity" without "subjectivity", and vice-versa. Object and subject form an inseparable dyad (though, importantly, not a "unity"), and it is precisely in the attempts to derive one from the other rather than take them as necessarily conditioning each other, that leads to so much philosophical confusion, empty speculation, and sophistry.
Anthony Gray
plump
Juan Peterson
So will, the thing-in-itself, DOES obey causality, in a way?
Proper causality might require an observer and time and space, but if the representations obey causality, then the things-in-themselves must behave in a way that would be called causal if they could be observed. Is that what he is saying?
James James
No you are always a manifestation of the will. You cease to exist as specific phenomena. You were one and you are still one after you die
