Why should only the professional philosophers have all the fun? It seems to me there have been way too many intellectual elites closing doors to their abstract world of philosophy in recent history, and it's time for change! It's time to unloose the chains of that ancient Promethean ideal of Free & Fiery Thought, right here on the Meta-Kastrup Metaphysical Forum - where professional philosophers and lay-speculators alike can strap on their gloves, step into the ring, and duke it out over who should win the Prize for the title of Best Philosopher of All Time.
Well, actually... best philosopher of the last 500 years. We have to use a temporal cut-off or else people will be nominating Buddha the Bodhisattva, Hermes the Trismegistus, Christ the Incarnate, and all manner of gnomes, fairies, pixies, angels, demons and whatever other creature can be Imagined on M@L's green Astral-turf. I am also going to take the liberty of ruling out all non-idealist philosophers right from the jump. Likewise, we are striking out philosophers whose works have not been widely translated into English, because not enough people here will be familiar with their philosophical arguments in the slightest (sorry to all the brilliant Zen Buddhist philosophers out there, try writing in English next time!).
Also out from consideration are any philosophers still alive, because I doubt any of them make the cut yet (but they still have time to prove us wrong). We are striking Kant, because, let's be honest, not a single person here wants to defend his epistemology. Nietzsche is out, because no one here will be able to agree on what he actually argued for, and, if Nietzsche were here with us, he would agree. Only people who have made strictly philosophical arguments in at least one book qualify - so no Carl Jung or any scientists in general. As readers probably guessed from the title, we are actually limiting the contest to Arthur "the Last Will and Testament" Schopenhauer and Rudolf "the Metamorphic Monstrosity" Steiner.
I think that Schopenhauer's and Steiner's idealist positions combined represent most other idealist philosophers writing in the West over the relevant time period closely enough for them to be the only fighters needed. Their arguments will stand in for all others with similar arguments. Others here are welcome to throw allegedly qualified names into the ring for consideration, but a solid case must be made for why they deserve to be in there, directly related to the "Topic of Contention" below, and how they represent a substantially different position than Schopenhauer or Steiner. Make no mistake, this battle-to-the-death is not about popularity, status, influence, or anything similar to those superficial qualities - it is about Truth and nothing but the Truth.
ON THE RED TEAM (SCHOPENHAUER)
Bernardo "the Decoding" Kastrup (likely in absentia)
Eugene "the Tolerant" Mystic
Lou "Shine Don't Whine" Gold
Adur "the new guy" Alkain
Martin "the Orgasmic Alter"
"Feelin' Like a Million" Starbucks
ON THE BLUE TEAM (STEINER)
Cleric the Clairvoyant
Scott "Mumorphic" Roberts
Dana-in-the-soul-of-Shu
finding "the BK hater" blanks
JL "the Dao that can be spoken" Pratt
Ashvin-the-Argumentative, Esquire
Bernardo "the Decoding" Kastrup (likely in absentia)
Eugene "the Tolerant" Mystic
Lou "Shine Don't Whine" Gold
Adur "the new guy" Alkain
Martin "the Orgasmic Alter"
"Feelin' Like a Million" Starbucks
ON THE BLUE TEAM (STEINER)
Cleric the Clairvoyant
Scott "Mumorphic" Roberts
Dana-in-the-soul-of-Shu
finding "the BK hater" blanks
JL "the Dao that can be spoken" Pratt
Ashvin-the-Argumentative, Esquire
Anyone above is free to switch sides if they feel I misplaced them, or bow out if they do not wish to participate, but you must pick a side to lay feet in this ring (not that I can stop you from breaking my ground rules... but I hope we are operating on good faith and the "honor system" here). You don't have to agree with everything the idea-fighter claimed, but you must come down on a side within the Topic of Contention outlined further below. Anyone who is not listed above and desires to participate, please comment and let us know whether you are on the RED or the BLUE team. Please do not write anything else unless it complies with the rules for round one below.
RULES FOR ROUND ONE
- Comments can only contain your name and/or preferred moniker (feel free to change whatever I gave you), what team you are on, and one sentence of reasonable length (I think we all know what that is...) as to why you joined the team, or stating whatever else you want other contestants to know.
Exception: if you are throwing another idealist philosopher's name into the ring, you can write as much as you feel necessary to make the case.
- No more than one comment per person (so try not to post until you are happy with the comment - if the edit comment clock runs out, you are stuck with what you wrote unless you delete entire comment).
- Please do not ask to change the topic of contention (perhaps we can save any such topics for a future round)
- This should go without saying, but no personal attacks of any sort, unnecessarily foul language, anything that otherwise violates the forum rules.
- No videos or pictures are allowed in this round.
TOPIC OF CONTENTION - WILLING VS. THINKING (WHICH TRULY LINKS US TO SHARED CONSCIOUSNESS?)
The reasons for choosing this philosophical topic above others is pretty obvious, but if it is not clear to anyone, it should be clarified by what follows. Although there is one reason which is perhaps the most important - we know exactly where each idea-fighter stands with respect to the other. Schopenhauer's position with respect to Steiner will given us to by Bernardo "the Decoding" Kastrup, who we can all agree is the foremost authority in this regard. I personally take it as good as from Schopenhauer's mouth himself. Steiner's position with respect to Schopenhauer on this topic is also crystal clear, as Steiner wrote about it at length (but we will only look at one encapsulating quote for now).
BK's defense of Schopenhauer comes from a recent Q&A session on the "Seeking 'I'" channel. I asked a rather long question which was generously and patiently asked to BK by the host (starts around minute 57:00 - note the host mistakenly says "humanely" instead of "humanly" twice, but I don't think it matters). BK then gives a very generous answer. The question was essentially a quote from Steiner in The Philosophy of Freedom (or Spiritual Activity). The entire question and answer are transcribed below (I encourage people to listen as well because a few words are left out from answer here or there, but nothing critical to the argument). Please take your time, read carefully and re-read as necessary. The teams are likely not yet set, but the battle lines are certainly drawn - will either team deliver a knockout blow and take home the Prize?
QUESTION:
What do you make of Steiner's critique of Schopenhauer as expressed in the following quote:
Steiner wrote:The foregoing arguments show that it is senseless to look for any common element in the separate entities of the world other than the ideal content that thinking offers us. All attempts to find a unity in the world other than this internally coherent ideal content, which we gain by a thoughtful contemplation of our percepts, are bound to fail. Neither a humanly personal God, nor force, nor matter, nor the blind will (Schopenhauer), can be valid for us as a universal world unity. All these entities belong only to limited spheres of our observation. Humanly limited personality we perceive only in ourselves; force and matter in external things. As far as the will is concerned, it can be regarded only as the expression of the activity of our finite personality.
Schopenhauer wants to avoid making “abstract” thinking the bearer of unity in the world, and seeks instead something which presents itself to him immediately as real. This philosopher believes that we can never approach the world so long as we regard it as “external” world. Schopenhauer considers himself entitled by these arguments to find in the human body the “objectivity” of the will. He believes that in the activities of the body he feels an immediate reality — the thing-in-itself in the concrete. Against these arguments it must be said that the activities of our body come to our consciousness only through percepts of the self, and that, as such, they are in no way superior to other percepts. If we want to know their real nature, we can do so only by a thinking investigation, that is, by fitting them into the ideal system of our concepts and ideas.
ANSWER:
BK wrote:The description of what Schopenhauer means is more or less accurate. The critique of it doesn't seem very forceful at all to me, it is a bit of hand-waving. It doesn't pin down any issue. Let me try to reiterate what Schopenhauer says. He comes from the Kantian starting point. The world as it is-in-itself is the noumenon, but we can never have direct access to the noumenon, to the world as it is in itself. All that we can access is how the world presents itself to us, and that's what we call the phenomenon, the contents of perception. But, of course, the image of something isn't the thing, as Nisargadatta Maharaj said, "to see God you have to look at the world, the only way to see beyond the world is to be God". In other words, the only way to know the noumenon is to be the noumenon. For as long you are only looking at the noumenon, all you have is the phenomenon, the way the noumenon presents itself to you. Then Kant concluded, we can never have access to the noumenon period because we are not the world.
Schopenhauer's insight was - I am a part of the world, and I am me, so as far as I am concerned, I do have direct access to the noumenon, because even if I ignore all of my physical body sensations, like the feeling of hunger, or a belly ache... suppose you are not in hunger, in no pain, you are relaxed and floating in a sensory deprivation chamber - you can see nothing, you can hear nothing, you can smell nothing, you can feel nothing on your skin, because it's like you are floating in anti-gravity... would you just turn off or would there still be something it is like to be you in that situation? And of course there is something it would still be like to be you... you could still have thoughts about what you are going to do next after the experiment ends, still have regrets, feelings that you loved someone... those feelings would still arise within you in the complete absence of sensations in the deprivation chamber. And for Schopenhauer, that is what he calls "the Will".
Why did he just call it "the Will", instead of "endogenous experiences" which it is called today. Because willing is the archetypal experience of an endogenous experience - you can will or not will, in the complete absence of physical sensations. You can still experience endogenous thoughts and emotions. The archetypal example of which is "the Will". What he meant by "the Will", and he is very explicit about that - he lists a number of examples - and among those are fear, and fear is the reverse of the Will... a kind of negative acceleration. So he lists a whole list of these endogenous experiences. So that's what he meant - he meant, in the absence of all phenomenon, there is still the noumenon. And that's what he experienced in himself by being himself. And he correctly concluded that he didn't need to represent the outside world or even represent the physical mechanisms of his own body in order to experience this Will. This Will is directly accessible to him through introspection.
And then the next step that he took, is to say - if the thing-in-itself when it comes to me, these endogenous experiences, in other words the Will in his terminology, and if what I look like when I am represented in my own mind or in the minds of other people is atoms, force fields, "matter", what it was called in his time. If the "matter" in my body is of the same kind as of the "matter" in the rest of the Universe, then I do have a logical, plausible way to make a correct inference about the noumenon out there even beyond my body. The noumenon out there should be something like the noumenon in here, because it presents itself in the same way out there as it does in my body. This is eminently logical.
Now, Steiner is talking about the "Unity", and he is probably taking a jab at Schopenhauer's contention that the Will is unitary; that it is not made of objects, it doesn't even have spatiotemporal extension. Which Schopenhauer called the "principle of individuation", which has nothing to do with Jung's "individuation". Schopenhauer said you can only say two things are different if they occupy different volumes of space or the same volumes of space at different moments in time. If you don't have spatiotemporal extension and everything overlaps with everything else, and per force, you have to have a Unity. Then he goes on, following Kant, that space-time are categories of cognition - they belong in the phenomenon, they are the way our own cognition splits the world apart from the screen of phenomenon to enable us to make sense of the world. But because, in the world as it is in itself then there is no space-time, because space-time belongs in the screen of phenomenon not in the noumenon.
If the noumenon is not in space-time, then you cannot taking things apart, because there is no extension for you to pull apart two things and have them occupy different points in space, or same point in space at different points in time. So everything else, the Will as it is in itself is Unitary. I think that is still an extraordinary plausible assertion. Why? Because neuroscience has been telling us our subjective experience of time is just that - it is highly subjective, it can be manipulated to the point that the order of things can change. We also know from Einstein's theory of GR that, if space-time is out there, then it can be twisted in such a way that what is present for you is past for somebody else. So the whole idea of space-time as fundamental has collapsed - both from physics and neuroscience.
More recently in physics with loop quantum gravity theories. The only way to reconcile QM and GR is to say time is itself not fundamental; it's a kind of byproduct of epiphenomenal processes. It is not in the foundation of nature but something that emerges dynamically as a result of some processes which themselves are not in space. So Schopenhauer's conclusions and assertions are more plausible and confirmed than ever before. I think time will be unable to prove him correct. We will become more and more aware that his intuition has brought him very close to the bullseye 200 years ago.
But for the humor of it I'll take my place in the team.
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