more from this thinker     |     more from this text


Single Idea 21922

[filed under theme 11. Knowledge Aims / C. Knowing Reality / 3. Idealism / a. Idealism ]

Full Idea

The double knowledge of the nature and action of our own body is the key to the inner being of every phenomenon in nature.

Gist of Idea

We know reality because we know our own bodies and actions

Source

Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea [1819], I 105), quoted by Peter B. Lewis - Schopenhauer 4

Book Ref

Lewis, Peter B.: 'Schopenhauer' [Reaktion Books 2012], p.93


A Reaction

Lewis calls this 'the heart of his philosophy'. Bodily awareness comes from acts of willing. So Lewis says 'the thing-in-itself is revealed to us in willing'. We experience Being and causation. Is he trying to combine idealism with the thing-in-itself?


The 19 ideas with the same theme [general thoughs about reality as ideas]:

The world is just the illusion of an appearance [Anon (Dham)]
The sun is always bright; it doesn't become bright when it emerges [Plutarch]
A whole is just its parts, but there are no smallest parts, so only minds and perceptions exist [Leibniz]
Leibniz said dualism of mind and body is illusion, and there is only mind [Leibniz, by Martin/Barresi]
Leibniz is an idealist insofar as the basic components of his universe are all mental [Leibniz, by Jolley]
We have no sensual experience of time and space, so they must be 'ideal' [Kant, by Pinkard]
Objects having to be experiencable is not the same as full idealism [Gardner on Kant]
If we disappeared, then all relations of objects, and time and space themselves, disappear too [Kant]
Mental presentation are not empirical, but concern the strivings of the self [Fichte]
For Schopenhauer, material things would not exist without the mind [Schopenhauer, by Janaway]
Schopenhauer can't use force/energy instead of 'will', because he is not a materialist [Lewis,PB on Schopenhauer]
The world only exists in relation to something else, as an idea of the one who conceives it [Schopenhauer]
We know reality because we know our own bodies and actions [Schopenhauer]
'Idealism' says that everything which exists is in some sense mental [Russell]
Eliminative idealists say there are no objects; reductive idealists say objects exist as complex experiences [Dancy,J]
Idealism explains appearances by identifying appearances with reality [Heil]
While space may just be appearance, time and change can't be, because the appearances change [Lowe]
Idealism is the link between reason and freedom [Pinkard]
Strong idealism is the sort of mess produced by a Cartesian separation of mind and world [Rowlands]