Kant, Schopenhauer, Wagner

Kant: what we can experience depends on 1) what there is to experience and 2) the apparatus we have for experiencing –– we can touch, see, think, remember, love, fear, etc. –– in these ways we can experience external and internal reality

This implies:

1) Anything that exists that our apparatus cannot register or cannot be registered by something else that conveys it to us cannot be apprehended by us.

2) Although we can be almost sure that part of reality lies outside any possibility of our experiencing it we have no way of envisaging what it is like.

3) The whole world of material objects in space and time that we experience is precisely that and only that, the world of experience –– such objects are called epistemological objects –– beware the illusion of realism: mistaking objects of our experience for objects existing independently of experience.

4) The structural features of our experience cannot exist independently of that experience –– our experience of the external world presents that world to us as if it were persisting in a four-dimensional continuum of space and time + causality (one event causes another).

5) In that part of reality that does exist but is not amenable to experience there is no causality, no material objects, no space, no time.

Kant permanently destroyed factual knowledge-claims with regard to anything outside the realm of human experience.

Misunderstandings of Kant:

1) Reality is a product of our minds –– Kant says the opposite: whatever exists, exists independently of the human mind.

2) In arguing that there is a certain part of reality that we have no way of apprehending, Kant is insinuating a religious conception of reality –– not so at all.

Schopenhauer regarded Kant as mistaken:

1) Kant: outside the empirical world there could be things in the plural –– Schopenhauer: outside space and time everything must be one and undifferentiated.

Hence, total reality = phenomenal realm (highly differentiated world of material objects in space and time) + noumenal realm (single, undifferentiated something that is spaceless, timeless, non-material, beyond the reach of causality) which is inaccessible to experience –– thus, the noumenon cannot cause the phenomenon –– so Schopenhauer concludes: the noumenon and phenomenon are the same reality apprehended in two different ways: the noumenon is the inner significance, the true but hidden and inaccessible being, of what we perceive outwardly as the phenomenal world.

Schopenhauer's ethics: humans are separate physical objects in space and time, temporary manifestations in the phenomenal world, of something  noumenal –– this implies that in the ultimate ground of our being we are the same something –– so the wrongdoer and the wronged are in the last analysis the same –– this explains compassion.

After Schopenhauer had worked out these ideas he discovered that they were central to Hinduism and Buddhism.

Hinduism: abiding reality is immaterial, spaceless, timeless and above all One, and that it is impersonal, unknowable and indescribable, while the world as presented to us by our bodily senses is a mere passing show of temporary phenomena, and as such a play of shadows, a veil of illusions.

Buddhism: stresses that our apparent separateness as selves is one of those illusions, and that in timeless reality there are no separate selves –– and no separate God either –– but a unity of all being, so that what appear to be the sufferings of each are really the sufferings of all, and wrongdoing damages the wrongdoer.

Buddhism and Schopenhauer pessimistic, but Schopenhauer did not believe in reincarnation though he was a misanthropist.

Since the noumenal something of which we are the phenomenal embodiment is unknowable and inapprehensible what do we call it? –– Schopenhauer called it the will (because the will to live seems to be the ultimate impulse we can discover in ourselves).

Schopenhauer also stresses importance of sexuality and compares our experience of art with it: it takes us out of our selves –– all the arts except music are representational (art shows us the universal behind the particular) –– music, though, is the self-expression of something that cannot be represented at all, viz. the noumenon, the voice of the metaphysical will, an alternative mode of existence to the world itself, superior to the other arts, able to express truths about our existence that our intellects are unable to comprehend.