MBTI & Ideas
Schopenhauer’s Encounter with Indian Thought (Stephen Cross, 2013)
“The continuous flow of such mental images, when derived from sensory perception rather than dream or thought, is what we think of as the external world.
However, it is only the mental representations that we experience with immediacy and certainty; we do not know whether these correspond to an external reality existing in its own right and outside our consciousness.
The only certainty we have is the presence of the representation in consciousness, and since philosophy must build upon a foundation of certainty, only this can be its starting point.”
(…)
“Schopenhauer does not question the assumption that the representations forming the empirical world are based upon sensation: perception comes about through the medium of a body, from whose affections it starts.
But a sensation is not a representation; it is simply an event occurring in one of the sense organs, nothing more than a local specific feeling (…) formless and without meaning— a chaos of raw sensations we could not interpret. (…)
How then does it come about that sensation—in current terms, electrochemical data passing from the senses to the brain—which lacks a spatial dimension, is transformed into perception and thus into representations?
The answer, Schopenhauer argues, lies in the operation of the understanding.”
(…)
“Schopenhauer explains the process in the following words:
'The understanding grasps the given sensation of the body as an effect (a word comprehended only by the understanding), and this effect as such must necessarily have a cause.’ (…)
When sensation occurs in one or more of the sense organs, causality at once traces this back to a cause, and, unlike the reflective intellect, its operations are so rapid that we are not aware of them. (…)
And it is the understanding that directs the movements of the duelist’s sword or (to give an example not found in Schopenhauer) the actions of the sportsman on the field suddenly producing the winning stroke or the unexpected goal.
Thus it is the understanding, the inborn knowledge of causality and the ability to seize its connections directly, intuitively, and without the intervention of a chain of rational thought, that supplies our fundamental knowledge.”
(…)
“While through the faculty of reason we know the world only conceptually and in abstraction, the understanding gives it to us as an actual, tangible reality that affects us and can be affected by us. (…)
The faculty of reason is secondary. It is an additional faculty, a tool for survival possessed by humankind alone, the function of which is to convert the concrete representations of the understanding into abstract concepts;
in this way it distances us from their immediacy and endows us with the power to manipulate them at will.”
