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Lightnings. Schopenhauer. World as Idea II

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 To clarify the concept of the Volitive Soul, it is necessary to understand well what the Will is, which leads us first to the understanding of the world as an Idea and then to the understanding of the world as Will. The sense in which Schopenhauer uses the concept "Idea" is the same as that of my concept "representation."

  

So then the world as idea, the only aspect in which we consider it at present, has two fundamental, necessary, and inseparable halves. The one half is the object, the forms of which are space and time, and through these multiplicity. The other half is the subject, which is not in space and time, for it is present, entire and undivided, in every percipient being. So that any one percipient being, with the object, constitutes the whole world as idea just as fully as the existing millions could do; but if this one were to disappear, then the whole world as idea would cease to be. These halves are therefore inseparable even for thought, for each of the two has meaning and existence only through and for the other, each appears with the other and vanishes with it.

 

Arthur Schopenhauer. The World As Will And Idea.V.1.#2

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Em said…
So if I understand the world as idea; only existing between subject & object; then it answers the age old question “If a tree falls in the woods a nobody hears it, does it make a sound?” with “Without subject, there’s no tree.” Yes?
January 17, 2024 at 1:14 PM
Oscar Enrique Muñoz said…
Without subject there is no object. In relation to the classic question: “If a tree falls in the woods no one hears it, does it make a sound?”, the first thing to say is that it is an ambiguous question and not very well formulated. Basically what is being asked is whether there is an objective world apart from the subject. If no human observes the event, it is not a question of whether or not it makes a sound, but rather the question is that there is no tree. The spatio-temporal object of our perception needs a specific concept to be a tree, that is, it needs the human Intellectual Soul to be a tree and not an indefinite mass in the forest. The tree is not a tree for the ants that live in it, it is something else that fulfills a certain function in the world that is determined by the particular Soul of the ants. The birds that lived in it will hear the sound of their house falling, but not that of a tree. The Tree is a concept. Perception without concept is blind, it is something indefinite.
Humans live in a human universe that is the result of the symbiosis of the Human Spirit, the human "I Am", and the specific configuration of the Universal Soul that corresponds to the Human Being.
January 17, 2024 at 6:15 PM
Em said…
Wonderful. This feels related to how I have recently been rewatching films I recall seeing in my childhood and have discovered entire “mature” stories and themes within them that I had no memory or meaning for me before. This, I have concluded, is because at that young age had no concept for some of these “adult” ideas (themes of infidelity or references to arousal for instance) so they held no meaning to my child mind, so there was no categorical place to stored in my mental map. However if watched with an adult who then reacted with shame or embarrassment, even without concept, I had a feeling I knew to assign to these instances. These are like ghosts of memories; just feelings but without form. If I understand you correctly then, even if I perceive the tree from a position where I have no concept/symbol of a tree (as an infant perhaps) it is not a tree to me.
January 18, 2024 at 4:53 PM
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