Although Schopenhauer set himself against people like Hegel, his outlook still seems to have been a sort of theistic Berkeleyan idealism, in which everything that exists owes its existence to being the object of a universal consciousness; the difference between Hegel and Schopenhauer being, that Hegel calls this universal consciousness rational and good, whereas Schopenhauer calls it irrational and evil, a cosmic Will whose local manifestation in oneself should be annulled through the pursuit of indifference.
But I’m much more like a materialist, in that I think of the world as consisting of external causal interactions between multiple entities, some of which have a mindlike interior, but which don’t owe their existence to their being posited by an overarching cosmic mind. I say a large part of the problem is just that physicalism employs an insufficiently rich ontology. Its categories don’t include the possibility of “entity with a mindlike interior”.
To put it another way: Among all the entities that the world contains, are entities which we can call subjects or persons or thinking beings, and these entities themselves “contain” “ideas of objects” and “experiences of objects”. My problem with physicalism is not that it refuses to treat all actual objects as ideas, or otherwise embed all objects into subjects; it is just that it tries to do without the ontological knowledge obtained by self-reflection, which is the only way we know that there are such things as conscious beings, with their specific properties.
Somehow, we possess the capacity to conceive of a self, as well as the capacity to conceive of objects independent of the self. Physicalism tries to understand everything using only this second capacity, and as such is methodologically blind to the true nature of anything to do with consciousness, which can only be approached through the first capacity. This bias produces a “mechanistic, materialistic” concept of the universe, and then we wonder where the ghost in the machine is hiding. The “amputation of the subjective part” really refers to the attempt to do without knowledge of the first kind, when understanding reality.
Although Schopenhauer set himself against people like Hegel, his outlook still seems to have been a sort of theistic Berkeleyan idealism, in which everything that exists owes its existence to being the object of a universal consciousness; the difference between Hegel and Schopenhauer being, that Hegel calls this universal consciousness rational and good, whereas Schopenhauer calls it irrational and evil, a cosmic Will whose local manifestation in oneself should be annulled through the pursuit of indifference.
But I’m much more like a materialist, in that I think of the world as consisting of external causal interactions between multiple entities, some of which have a mindlike interior, but which don’t owe their existence to their being posited by an overarching cosmic mind. I say a large part of the problem is just that physicalism employs an insufficiently rich ontology. Its categories don’t include the possibility of “entity with a mindlike interior”.
To put it another way: Among all the entities that the world contains, are entities which we can call subjects or persons or thinking beings, and these entities themselves “contain” “ideas of objects” and “experiences of objects”. My problem with physicalism is not that it refuses to treat all actual objects as ideas, or otherwise embed all objects into subjects; it is just that it tries to do without the ontological knowledge obtained by self-reflection, which is the only way we know that there are such things as conscious beings, with their specific properties.
Somehow, we possess the capacity to conceive of a self, as well as the capacity to conceive of objects independent of the self. Physicalism tries to understand everything using only this second capacity, and as such is methodologically blind to the true nature of anything to do with consciousness, which can only be approached through the first capacity. This bias produces a “mechanistic, materialistic” concept of the universe, and then we wonder where the ghost in the machine is hiding. The “amputation of the subjective part” really refers to the attempt to do without knowledge of the first kind, when understanding reality.