POPc Participant Phil’s Post:
I talked with Kate today about Schopenhauer and the will, and how we experience motions differently. We were wrestling with what the will is exactly, and how it affacts what knowledge we acquire. I think that knowledge is a very personal thing that is largely determined by one’s individual experience, even when it comes to emotion. We can take certain similar experiences in different ways. Many of the things that we know and feel that are universal to some extent are also indescribable, such as a subconscious feeling of acceptance or rejection within a crowd. We can identify with the general feeling of anxiety or comfort, but may have a different value or meaning for it in relation to our individual experiences.
Shottenkirk’s Response to Phil:
Dear Phillip,
As I know your philosophical views fairly well, I’m tempted to not respond to just your post but to your larger body of knowledge. But that could go on forever, so perhaps I will just stick to the rules and stick to the post. (This is perhaps a good idea even though I made up the rules and so surely can un-make them, but just to make things look less random and chaotic, I will be obedient to myself…)
Which bring us nicely to Schopenhauer. Obedience plays an interesting role in his thought, but again talking about that might be an endless detour. To pinpoint him a bit more and to address your concern with the will: “To explain this somewhat more accurately, I remind the reader that our consciousness has two sides; in part it is consciousness of our own selves, which is the will, and in part consciousness of other things, and as such primarily knowledge of the external world through perception, apprehension of objects.” (S., The World As Will and Representation Vol. II Trans EFJ Payne (NY: Dover, 1958), p. 367) In volume I, he states, “All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering.” (p. 196)
I am no Schopenhauer expert, as I only spent a bit less than a year studying him (during the writing of my dissertation). And, as you might guess, he veers a little too closely to Kant’s belief in a firmly established external, objective source of truth – it’s a bit too much for me to want to spend time with him. But you know they say Schopenhauer always slept with a loaded pistol near him, so perhaps that belief in certainty was only superficial.
Anyway, your issue was how the will affects what kind of knowledge we gain. If you go with Schopenhauer’s definition of the will (a definition which does fluctuate a bit), it revolves around our distinct awareness of ourselves; an awareness that seems qualitatively different from our awareness of everything else. I understand your argument that we all experience things a bit differently, but it is, it seems to me, hard to prove that one way or the other. There is, on the one hand, the subjective experience, and then there are two other things as well: my articulation of my subjective experience, and your parsing of my articulation. By the time you have listened to my experience and compared it with yours, that e.g., your parsing or understanding of my articulation – is three stages beyond the initial experience itself. Each stage of that process, from my original experience to my articulation to your parsing of my articulation, must distort both what it translates (e.g., the previous stage) as well as distorting that originary metaphysical data. Much is left unarticulated, both because much is missed and not realized in the initial experience, and much is left unarticulated simply (as you point out) because we are unable to articulate much of that. Words are to experience like boulders are to sand. It cannot do the work we hope it to do.
So yes, maybe we experience things differently from one another. But then, maybe we don’t. Maybe there is this (as you also point out) universality to some kinds of experience, which would make a certain amount of sense as we are all animals of certain species operating within the constraints imposed by that species. For example, we all have two eyes that work the same, etc. But again, how far that universality goes is hard to nail down. Science – the physics of bodies, the biology of our organisms, the chemistry that lurks beneath both – is surely about that universality of our bodies. So of course a great deal of the claim to universality is true, at least within that materialist sort of realm. It is when one steps over into psychological that the hard ground turns to quicksand. How much is my experience like yours?...
But we shouldn’t follow S. down into that spiral of sourness. Let’s do a Monty Python and “look on the bright side of life”. If we say that the difficulty is just knowing what is shared and what is not, we can, instead of focusing on the insolvability of that, then see what we gain with that dilemma. Surely our ignorance of what is shared and what is universal must be the ripe source of much that is pleasurable and meaningful: I listen to you and try to parse your explanations because I want to know. And, I care about what you say because I want to know. If I already knew, I wouldn’t listen, and I wouldn’t care. Not knowing whether or not my subjective experience is like yours seems like a small price to pay for that. Right?