The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3)Schopenhauer, Arthur
Philosophy
The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3)
Schopenhauer, Arthur
Idea (Philosophy); Knowledge, Theory of; Philosophy; Will
object vanish also, and nothing remains but _matter without form and
quality_, which can just as little occur in experience as a subject
without the forms of its knowledge, but which remains opposed to the naked
subject as such, as its reflex, which can only disappear along with it.
Although materialism pretends to postulate nothing more than this
matter—for instance, atoms—yet it unconsciously adds to it not only the
subject, but also space, time, and causality, which depend upon special
properties of the subject.
The world as idea, the objective world, has thus, as it were, two poles;
the simple knowing subject without the forms of its knowledge, and crude
matter without form and quality. Both are completely unknowable; the
subject because it is that which knows, matter because without form and
quality it cannot be perceived. Yet both are fundamental conditions of all
empirical perception. Thus the knowing subject, merely as such, which is a
presupposition of all experience, stands opposed as its pure counterpart
to the crude, formless, and utterly dead (_i.e._, will-less) matter, which
is given in no experience, but which all experience presupposes. This
subject is not in time, for time is only the more definite form of all its
ideas. The matter which stands over against it is, like it, eternal and
imperishable, endures through all time, but is, properly speaking, not
extended, for extension gives form, thus it has no spatial properties.
Everything else is involved in a constant process of coming into being and
passing away, while these two represent the unmoved poles of the world as
idea. The permanence of matter may therefore be regarded as the reflex of
the timelessness of the pure subject, which is simply assumed as the
condition of all objects. Both belong to phenomena, not to the thing in
itself, but they are the framework of the phenomenon. Both are arrived at
only by abstraction, and are not given immediately, pure and for
themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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