The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3) — John Shaqi
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
sole form and function, yet one so rich in results that all our empirical
knowledge rests upon it. If, as has often been said, the refutation of an
error is only complete when the way it originated has been psychologically
demonstrated, I believe I have achieved this, with regard to Kant’s
doctrine of the categories and their schemata, in what I have said above.
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After Kant had thus introduced such great errors into the first simple
outlines of a theory of the faculty of perception, he adopted a variety of
very complicated assumptions. To these belongs first of all the synthetic
unity of apperception: a very strange thing, very strangely explained.
“The _I think_ must be able to accompany all my ideas.” Must—be able: this
is a problematic-apodictic enunciation; in plain English, a proposition
which takes with one hand what it gives with the other. And what is the
meaning of this carefully balanced proposition? That all knowledge of
ideas is thinking? That is not the case: and it would be dreadful; there
would then be nothing but abstract conceptions, or at any rate a pure
perception free from reflection and will, such as that of the beautiful,
the deepest comprehension of the true nature of things, _i.e._, of their
Platonic Ideas. And besides, the brutes would then either think also, or
else they would not even have ideas. Or is the proposition perhaps
intended to mean: no object without a subject? That would be very badly
expressed by it, and would come too late. If we collect Kant’s utterances
on the subject, we shall find that what he understands by the synthetic
unity of apperception is, as it were, the extensionless centre of the
sphere of all our ideas, whose radii converge to it. It is what I call the
subject of knowing, the correlative of all ideas, and it is also that
which I have fully described and explained in the 22d chapter of the
Supplements, as the focus in which the rays of the activity of the brain
converge. Therefore, to avoid repetition, I now refer to that chapter.
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