It's impressively easy to misunderstand the point made in
last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report. To say that the world we
experience is made up of representations of reality, constructed in our minds
by taking the trickle of data we get from the senses and fitting those into
patterns that are there already, doesn’t mean that nothing exists outside of
our minds. Quite the contrary, in fact; there are two very good reasons to
think that there really is something “out there,” a reality outside our minds
that produces the trickle of data we’ve discussed.
The first of those reasons seems almost absurdly simple at
first glance: the world doesn’t always make sense to us. Consider, as one
example out of godzillions, the way that light seems to behave like a particle
on some occasions and like a wave on others. That’s been described,
inaccurately, as a paradox, but it’s actually a reflection of the limitations
of the human mind.
What, after all, does it mean to call something a particle?
Poke around the concept for a while and you’ll find that at root, this concept
“particle” is an abstract metaphor, extracted from the common human experience
of dealing with little round objects such as pebbles and marbles. What, in
turn, is a wave? Another abstract metaphor, extracted from the common human
experience of watching water in motion. When a physicist says that light
sometimes acts like a particle and sometimes like a wave, what she’s saying is
that neither of these two metaphors fits more than a part of the way that light
behaves, and we don’t have any better metaphor available.
If the world was nothing but a hallucination projected by
our minds, then it would contain nothing that wasn’t already present in our
minds—for what other source could there be?
That implies in turn that there would be a perfect match between the
contents of the world and the contents of our minds, and we wouldn’t get the
kind of mismatch between mind and world that leaves physicists flailing. More
generally, the fact that the world so often baffles us offers good evidence
that behind the world we experience, the world as representation, there’s some
“thing in itself” that’s the source of the sense data we assemble into
representations.
The other reason to think that there’s a reality distinct
from our representations is that, in a certain sense, we experience such a
reality at every moment.
Raise one of your hands to a position where you can see it,
and wiggle the fingers. You see the fingers wiggling—or, more precisely, you
see a representation of the wiggling fingers, and that representation is
constructed in your mind out of bits of visual data, a great deal of memory,
and certain patterns that seem to be hardwired into your mind. You also feel
the fingers wiggling—or, here again, you feel a representation of the wiggling
fingers, which is constructed in your mind out of bits of tactile and
kinesthetic data, plus the usual inputs from memory and hardwired patterns. Pay
close attention and you might be able to sense the way your mind assembles the
visual representation and the tactile one into a single pattern; that happens
close enough to the surface of consciousness that a good many people can catch
themselves doing it.
So you’ve got a representation of wiggling fingers, part of
the world as representation we experience. Now ask yourself this: the action of
the will that makes the fingers wiggle—is that a representation?
This is where things get interesting, because the only
reasonable answer is no, it’s not. You don’t experience the action of the will
as a representation; you don’t experience it at all. You simply wiggle your
fingers. Sure, you experience the results of the will’s action in the form of
representations—the visual and tactile experiences we’ve just been
considering—but not the will itself. If it were true that you could expect to
see or hear or feel or smell or taste the impulse of the will rolling down your
arm to the fingers, say, it would be reasonable to treat the will as just one
more representation. Since that isn’t the case, it’s worth exploring the
possibility that in the will, we encounter something that isn’t just a
representation of reality—it’s a reality we encounter directly.
That’s the insight at the foundation of Arthur Schopenhauer’s
philosophy. Schopenhauer’s one of the two principal guides who are going to
show us around the giddy funhouse that philosophy has turned into of late, and
guide us to the well-marked exits, so you’ll want to know a little about him.
He lived in the ramshackle assortment of little countries that later became the
nation of Germany; he was born in 1788 and died in 1860; he got his doctorate
in philosophy in 1813; he wrote his most important work, The World as Will
and Representation, before he turned thirty; and he spent all but the last
ten years of his life in complete obscurity, ignored by the universities and
almost everyone else. A small inheritance, carefully managed, kept him from
having to work for a living, and so he spent his time reading, writing, playing
the flute for an hour a day before dinner, and grumbling under his breath as
philosophy went its merry way into metaphysical fantasy. He grumbled a lot, and
not always under his breath. Fans of Sesame Street can think of him as
philosophy’s answer to Oscar the Grouch.
Schopenhauer came of age intellectually in the wake of
Immanuel Kant, whose work we discussed briefly last week, and so the question
he faced was how philosophy could respond to the immense challenge Kant threw
at the discipline’s feet. Before you go back to chattering about what’s true
and what’s real, Kant said in effect, show me that these labels mean something
and relate to something, and that you’re not just chasing phantoms manufactured
by your own minds.
Most of the philosophers who followed in Kant’s footsteps
responded to his challenge by ignoring it, or using various modes of handwaving
to pretend that it didn’t matter. One common gambit at the time was to claim
that the human mind has a special superpower of intellectual intuition that
enables it to leap tall representations in a single bound, and get to a direct
experience of reality that way. What that meant in practice, of course, is that
philosophers could claim to have intellectually intuited this, that, and the other
thing, and then build a great tottering system on top of them. What that meant
in practice, of course, that a philosopher could simply treat whatever
abstractions he fancied as truths that didn’t have to be proved; after all,
he’d intellectually intuited them—prove that he hadn’t!
There were other such gimmicks. What set Schopenhauer apart
was that he took Kant’s challenge seriously enough to go looking for something
that wasn’t simply a representation. What he found—why, that brings us back to
the wiggling fingers.
As discussed in last week’s post, every one of the world’s
great philosophical traditions has ended up having to face the same challenge
Kant flung in the face of the philosophers of his time. Schopenhauer knew this,
since a fair amount of philosophy from India had been translated into European
languages by his time, and he read extensively on the subject. This was helpful
because Indian philosophy hit its own epistemological crisis around the tenth
century BCE, a good twenty-nine centuries before Western philosophy got there,
and so had a pretty impressive head start. There’s a rich diversity of
responses to that crisis in the classical Indian philosophical schools, but
most of them came to see consciousness as a (or the) thing-in-itself, as reality
rather than representation.
It’s a plausible claim. Look at your hand again, with or
without wiggling fingers. Now be aware of yourself looking at the hand—many
people find this difficult, so be willing to work at it, and remember to feel
as well as see. There’s your hand; there’s the space between your hand and your
eyes; there’s whatever of your face you can see, with or without eyeglasses
attached; pay close attention and you can also feel your face and your eyes
from within; and then there’s—
There’s the thing we call consciousness, the whatever-it-is
that watches through your eyes. Like the act of will that wiggled your fingers,
it’s not a representation; you don’t experience it. In fact, it’s very like the
act of will that wiggled your fingers, and that’s where Schopenhauer went his
own way.
What, after all, does it mean to be conscious of something?
Some simple examples will help clarify this. Move your hand until it bumps into
something; it’s when something stops the movement that you feel it. Look at
anything; you can see it if and only if you can’t see through it. You are
conscious of something when, and only when, it resists your will.
That suggested to Schopenhauer that consciousness derives
from will, not the other way around. There were other lines of reasoning that
point in the same direction, and all of them derive from common human
experiences. For example, each of us stops being conscious for some hours out
of every day, whenever we go to sleep. During part of the time we’re sleeping,
we experience nothing at all; during another part, we experience the weirdly
disconnected representations we call “dreams.”
Even in dreamless sleep, though, it’s common for a sleeper to shift a
limb away from an unpleasant stimulus. Thus the will is active even when
consciousness is absent.
Schopenhauer proposed that there are different forms or, as
he put it, grades of the will. Consciousness, which we can define for present
purposes as the ability to experience representations, is one grade of the
will—one way that the will can adapt to existence in a world that often resists
it. Life is another, more basic grade. Consider the way that plants orient
themselves toward sunlight, bending and twisting like snakes in slow motion,
and seek out concentrations of nutrients with probing, hungry roots. As far as
anyone knows, plants aren’t conscious—that is, they don’t experience a world of
representations the way that animals do—but they display the kind of
goal-seeking behavior that shows the action of will.
Animals also show goal-seeking behavior, and they do it in a
much more complex and flexible way than plants do. There’s good reason to think
that many animals are conscious, and experience a world of representations in
something of the same way we do; certainly students of animal behavior have
found that animals let incidents from the past shape their actions in the
present, mistake one person for another, and otherwise behave in ways that
suggest that their actions are guided, as ours are, by representations rather
than direct reaction to stimuli. In animals, the will has developed the ability
to represent its environment to itself.
Animals, at least the more complex ones, also have that
distinctive mode of consciousness we call emotion. They can be happy, sad,
lonely, furious, and so on; they feel affection for some beings and aversion
toward others. Pay attention to your own emotions and you’ll soon notice how
closely they relate to the will. Some emotions—love and hate are among them—are
motives for action, and thus expressions of will; others—happiness and sadness
are among them—are responses to the success or failure of the will to achieve
its goals. While emotions are tangled up with representations in our minds, and
presumably in those of animals as well, they stand apart; they’re best
understood as conditions of the will, expressions of its state as it copes with
the world through its own representations.
And humans? We’ve got another grade of the will, which we
can call intellect: the ability to add
up representations into abstract concepts, which we do, ahem, at will. Here’s
one representation, which is brown and furry and barks; here’s another like it;
here’s a whole kennel of them—and we lump them all together in a single
abstract category, to which we assign a sound such as “dog.” We can then add
these categories together, creating broader categories such as “quadruped” and
“pet;” we can subdivide the categories to create narrower ones such as “puppy”
and “Corgi;” we can extract qualities from the whole and treat them as separate
concepts, such as “furry” and “loud;” we can take certain very general
qualities and conjure up the entire realm of abstract number, by noticing how
many paws most dogs have and using that, and a great many other things, to come
up with the concept of “four.”
So life, consciousness, and intellect are three grades of
the will. One interesting thing about them is that the more basic ones are more
enduring and stable than the more complex ones. Humans, again, are good
examples. Humans remain alive all the way from birth to death; they’re
conscious only when awake; they’re intelligent only when actively engaged in
thinking—which is a lot less often than we generally like to admit. A certain
degree of tiredness, a strong emotion, or a good stiff drink are usually enough
to shut off the intellect and leave us dealing with the world on the same
mental basis as an ordinarily bright dog; it takes quite a bit more to reduce
us to the vegetative level, and serious physical trauma to go one more level
down.
Let’s take a look at that final level, though. The
conventional wisdom of our age holds that everything that exists is made up of
something called “matter,” which is configured in various ways; further, that
matter is what really exists, and everything else is somehow a function of
matter if it exists at all. For most of us, this is the default setting, the
philosophical opinion we start from and come back to, and anyone who tries to
question it can count on massive pushback.
The difficulty here is that philosophers and scientists have
both proved, in their own ways, that the usual conception of matter is quite
simply nonsense. Any physical scientist worth his or her sodium chloride, to
begin with, will tell you that what we habitually call “solid matter” is nearly
as empty as the vacuum of deep space—a bit of four-dimensional curved spacetime
that happens to have certain tiny probability waves spinning dizzily in it, and
it’s the interaction between those probability waves and those composing that
other patch of curved spacetime we each call “my body” that creates the
illusions of solidity, color, and the other properties we attribute to matter.
The philosophers got to the same destination a couple of
centuries earlier, and by a different route. The epistemologists I mentioned in
last week’s post—Locke, Berkeley, and Hobbes—took the common conception of
matter apart layer by layer and showed, to use the formulation we’ve already
discussed, that all the things we attribute to matter are simply
representations in the mind. Is there something out there that causes those
representations? As already mentioned, yes, there’s very good reason to think
so—but that doesn’t mean that the “something out there” has to consist of matter
in any sense of the word that means anything.
That’s where Schopenhauer got to work, and once again, he
proceeded by calling attention to certain very basic and common human
experiences. Each of us has direct access, in a certain sense, to one portion
of the “something out there,” the portion each of us calls “my body.” When we
experience our bodies, we experience them as representations, just like
anything else—but we also act with them, and as the experiment with the
wiggling fingers demonstrated, the will that acts isn’t a representation.
Thus there’s a boundary between the part of the universe we
encounter as will and representation, and the part we encounter only as
representation. The exact location of that boundary is more complex than it
seems at first sight. It’s a commonplace in the martial arts, for example, that
a capable martial artist can learn to feel with a weapon as though it were a
part of the body. Many kinds of swordsmanship, for example, rely on what
fencers call sentiment de fer, the “sense of the steel;” the competent
fencer can feel the lightest touch of the other blade against his own, just as
though it brushed his hand.
There are also certain circumstances—lovemaking, dancing,
ecstatic religious experience, and mob violence are among them—in which under
certain hard-to-replicate conditions, two or more people seem to become, at
least briefly, a single entity that moves and acts with a will of its own. All
of those involve a shift from the intellect to a more basic grade of the will,
and they lead in directions that will deserve a good deal more examination
later on; for now, the point at issue is that the boundary line between self
and other can be a little more fluid than we normally tend to assume.
For our present purposes, though, we can set that aside and
focus on the body as the part of the world each of us encounters in a twofold
way: as a representation among representations, and as a means of expression
for the will. Everything we perceive
about our bodies is a representation, but by noticing these representations, we
observe the action of something that isn’t a representation, something we call
the will, manifesting in its various grades. That’s all there is. Go looking as
long as you want, says Schopenhauer, and you won’t find anything but will and
representations. What if that’s all there is—if the thing we call "matter" is simpy the most basic grade of the will, and everything in the world thus amounts
to will on the one hand, and representations experienced by that mode of will
we call consciousness on the other, and the thing that representations are
representing are various expressions of this one energy that, by way of its
distinctive manifestations in our own experience, we call the will?
That’s Schopenhauer’s vision. The remarkable thing is how
close it is to the vision that comes out of modern science. A century before
quantum mechanics, he’d already grasped that behind the facade of sensory
representations that you and I call matter lies an incomprehensible and
insubstantial reality, a realm of complex forces dancing in the void. Follow his
arguments out to their logical conclusion and you get a close enough equivalent
of the universe of modern physics that it’s not at all implausible that they’re
one and the same. Of course plausibility isn’t proof—but given the fragile,
dependent, and derivative nature of the human intellect, it may be as close as
we can get.
And of course that latter point is a core reason why Arthur
Schopenhauer spent most of his life in complete obscurity and why, after a
brief period of mostly posthumous superstardom in the late nineteenth century,
his work dropped out of sight and has rarely been noticed since. (To be
precise, it’s one of two core reasons; we’ll get to the other one later.) If
he’s right, then the universe is not rational. Reason—the disciplined use of
the grade of will I’ve called the intellect—isn’t a key to the truth of
things. It’s simply the systematic exploitation of a set of habits of
mind that turned out to be convenient for our ancestors as they struggled with
the hard but intellectually undemanding tasks of staying fed, attracting mates,
chasing off predators, and the like, and later on got pulled out of context and
put to work coming up with complicated stories about what causes the
representations we experience.
