No, I don't think so. Schopenhauer retained the essentials of transcendental idealism in respect of the second-last paragraph. The other points are very much his own.

Suppose the materialist view is somehow discovered to be 100% correct. — Art48

The problem is that very simple expressions such as 'this is the same as that', or 'this means that' or 'this is equal to that' have no material equivalent. There is no material equivalent of the concept of equality, for example. When we say that 2 + 2 = 4, we're relying on the innate capacity of reason to recognise sameness and difference, but that precise relationship cannot be observed in the physical domain except by a process of abstraction. Remove the capacity for abstraction and comparison, and you can't even form a coherent thought. That's the sense in which reason is not material - not as some 'spooky substance' or 'ethereal thing'.

If I really do cease to exist when I die, then I’ll never know it. If I cease to exist, there’s nothing left to know I no longer exist. — Art48

The problem that introduces is nihilism. Nihilism doesn't have to present itself in a very dramatic form, like a deep sense of foreboding or dread. It can simply manifest as the sense that nothing really matters. So if death nullifies or negates any differences between what beings do in life, that amounts to a form of nihilism, as Neitszche predicted (although of course he didn't believe in trying to cling to anything like belief in an after-life.)

Did I ever mention to you that essay by Ray Monk, Wittgenstein's biographer, on the ascendancy of Gilbert Ryle and his role in the Great Schism? How the untimely death of RG Collingwood changed the course of philosophy forever. Explains a lot about the current state of academic philosophy in my opinion.

My guess is that "objectification" is an eternal process that is foundational to Will, not contingent upon it. — schopenhauer1

Here are some cribbed notes:

For Schopenhauer Subjectivity includes Reason, Understanding and Will.

Will is the inner drive of which the forces of physics (attraction, repulsion, etc) are an outer manifestation.

Reason is the capacity to form abstract concepts. Schopenhauer is consistent with the larger tradition in saying that this is the prerogative of h. sapiens. (He implicitly recognises evolution although obviously not natural selection as that was published 40 years after his major work.)

Understanding automatically provides a spatio-temporal conceptual framework for our experience which is pre-rational (from Kant’s Transcendental Idealism)

Will is the primal drive that manifests as feelings, all of which are ultimately reducible to pleasure and pain in relation to willed objects, often subliminally.

Where we agree is that science misapplied goes badly astray. — Banno

Right. Most of the issues I refer to are the consequences of the attempt to apply the methods of science to the problems of philosophy. Sorry if I have to keep beating that drum, but it's the only one I have.

The realist attitude is the only possible attitude in the context of the common world we all obviously share. The naive move is to extrapolate this attitude as an absolute. — Janus

Right. So when I make this point, which to me is a crucial point, please don't keep saying 'oh yeah, so what. Everyone knows that.' It's kind of annoying. :angry:

That's probably why I find this forum so addictive. — plaque flag

Believe me, I hear you. Hardly a day goes by when I don't think, why am I wasting spending so much time on this Forum? Surely there are many more important things I could be doing. But

But I do think there is indeed a blind spot in some thinkers. — plaque flag

Whenever I bring this up, the reactions here are amazingly defensive. The first time I mentioned it, four years ago, there was a complete pile-on. 'These guys don't understand science! This article is just click bait! Who do they think they are?' (in a large part because I was the one who posted it and there was a mod back then who hated anything I wrote.)

But the original Blind Spot essay was not denigrating science at all. It says: 'This doesn’t mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this.' The authors are are far less relativistic or perspectival than, say, Neitszche. But they say, 'behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information.'

So the key thing is the claim that the data of scientific analysis are mind independent. @Banno might say that, tsk tsk, he eschews this kind of 'crude materialism', but you can show that it is at least implicit in the work of many of the 20th c philosophers he cites. It's not that they elaborate or make a big deal out of an explicitly materialist worldview, but that their 'ordinary language' philosophy abjures metaphysics, and it generally leaves the scientific realist attitude unquestioned. It is assumed, more than propogated, because the alternatives seem to carry distasteful metaphysical implications.

Anyway - why I always bring this up, is because phenomenology and Continental philosophy is much more alive to this issue than is the Anglosphere since Gilbert Ryle. I contend that most English-speaking philosophy departments do assume an implicitly naturalist attitude with all the metaphysical commitments this entails. Not so for European philosophers. And that, I contend, is because idealist philosophy lives on in the phenomenological tradition - not in its original form, of course, but mediated through Husserl and his successors who really do understand and take on board transcendental idealism. (Phew, long post, sorry. Had to get it off my chest.)

Exactly! Obviously, books don't talk back, but reading the original and then the various commentaries on the original, is very much a form of dialogue. Better still, obviously, to then actually discuss, as we do here, but reading, meanwhile, can be dialogical.

The Matrix was huge. — plaque flag

There was a fascinating BBC article a few years ago on why Inception, Matrix, and other multiverse fantasy films were such huge drawcards in popular culture. It suggests they play to our sense that we - including scientists - don't really know what is real any more, that the whole of existence could be a simulation, fantasy or dream. (I've gone back and looked for the article but can never find it.) There's also that fabulous 1990's movie, The Game, Michael Douglas, in which the protagonist is caught up by an EST-type organisation. But Schopenhauer's style of philosophy is far more compatible with these kinds of ideas than is stodgy realism.

Philosophy involves dialogue. — Banno

Reading is a form of dialogue.

I just don't see the point about science being only about how things appear to us as being difficult to understand or adding anything that hadn't already been pointed out by Kant, — Janus

How many people do you think have really taken on board Kant's 'copernican revolution in philosophy'? It is far less part of popular culture than 'the selfish gene' or many of the other tropes of neo-darwinian materialism.

Idealism has been moribund since the end of the century before last, — Banno

More 'unjustly neglected'. Furthermore, I know you and I have debated it at length, but I have never once gotten the impression that you really understand it - your rejection of it is invariably based on caricature of it - that 'the world is all in my mind'.

Fair enough, but I’m interested in a bit more detail, and it seems to me that both current idealism and phenomenology can provide it.

Seems a perfectly clear question. You say that hardly anyone holds to physicalist reductionism, so what do you say is an alternative to that?

But then I suppose it’s much easier to take pot-shots at others than to actually come up with a real alternative.

few folk would advocate that sort of reductionism. — Banno

So do you think human beings are purely or only physical in nature? And, if not, how to conceive of what about us is not physical?

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If you say not feeling but not concept either, it starts to sound like round squares, or like a completely indefinite hope. — plaque flag

One analogy that has occured to me, is that it would be more like being liberated from some deep psychological trauma that you had been holding and which had been affecting you without your being aware of it. So, something like catharsis, that results in a deep shift of your self-understanding and your view of life. I'm sure that would give rise to many feelings, but it's more than simply a feeling, as it is also something that you've come to understand about yourself and the world.

So when an individual will is properly denied (i.e. reaches a nirvana-like state), does that mean the whole Will is nullified or simply that manifestation?

@Quixodian do you have an answer (without smuggling in external philosophers)? — schopenhauer1

As I understand it, the individual is detached from the will - liberated, in the Eastern sense - through what S. understands as asceticism. That's why he praises St Francis of Assisi and Jesus as role models (paradoxical in light of his atheism).

When the ascetic transcends human nature, the ascetic resolves the problem of evil: by removing the individuated and individuating human consciousness from the scene, the entire spatio-temporal situation within which daily violence occurs is removed.

In a way, then, the ascetic consciousness can be said symbolically to return Adam and Eve to Paradise, for it is the very quest for knowledge (i.e., the will to apply the principle of individuation to experience) that the ascetic overcomes. — SEP

The Principle of Relativity urges that we look for explanations of such generality that they are consistent for all observers. That is not an unreasonable injunction, especially in combination with the Principle of Charity.

As I've said before, We're not looking for the view from nowhere, so much as the view from anywhere. — Banno

The point, as I see it, is really rather simple. The reductionist view is that the objects of fundamental physics are the only ultimately real things. Life and mind supervene on them, or emerge from them, but the only fundamental laws are the laws which govern those objects. Laws in any other sense are simply conventions or descriptions. You may not hold that view, and many others will disavow it, but nevertheless it remains the operative paradigm for many in today's culture, and it is that paradigm which is the target of criticism by idealists, phenomenologists, enactivists, and others.

I'd prefer to hear your well-informed & succinct opinion on the question of Schopenhauer's substitution of "Will" in place of "Soul". — Gnomon

I don't know if he does that, really. Still navigating the section on Will, I find it overall a lot harder to grasp than his 'representation' (vorstellung).

isn't this notion ultimately similar to the basis of phenomenology? — Tom Storm

Indeed, the essay I mentioned from which the book was developed includes discussion of Husserl (and Whitehead.) Neitszche, not so much - I think his relativism collapses into nihilism. But those three, Marcello Gleiser, Adam Frank and Evan Thompson, are the kinds of philosophers that I most appreciate in the current scene. (Check out the Gleiser and Frank's Big Think homepage and Adam Frank's essay Minding Matter.)

You said you got a "bollocking" when you presented that article; do you really believe that most of us here have a blind spot that only you are not subject to? — Janus

Not at all, but I don't think the point of the article was really grasped. Some of the comments were highly vituperative. I've recently discovered there's a youtube lecture series from the workshop (at Dartmouth) that was held after that article was published, and now, as I mentioned, there's a book being published about it. The salient passage in the book abstract is this: 'Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going, but we’ve gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system." That is a salient diagnosis of the modern 'problem of knowledge' in my opinion. But if you tell me you don't see the point, then I won't press it!

It presumptuous to claim that I'm not seeing a point that you cannot explain — Janus

I linked to the original article The Blind Spot of Science about four years ago which you said, at the time, that you couldn't see the point of, so there's no point in my trying to explain it again. At the time I posted about that article, there was a complete pile-on by yourself and various others, saying what a crap article it was, belittles science, it's just click-bait. But, as I say, it's now being published in book form, so I'm more inclined to believe the authors than the PF contributors who belittled it.

You seem to be confused on precisely this point. — Janus

A point that you're not seeing the significance of, and which I can't explain further, other than to say that it's the subject of the book I mentioned, which seems an important book to me.

The OP opens many cans of worms but as I have an interest in the subject, I better add some more.

I'm strongly incline to interpret all of this in terms of Feeling — plaque flag

I think a better interpretation is in terms of metacognition - the understanding of understanding. There are innummerable maps and means developed in various cultures that address this. Feeling comes into it, but perhaps more as a consequence than cause.

I think it's important to recognise that what we're assessing are different perspectives on the nature of being. (The word 'reality' is often used here, but I think 'being' is more appropriate.)

In respect of the interpretation of 'the kingdom of Heaven', perennialists will say that 'the Kingdom of Heaven' corresponds with, or means the same as, the Buddhist Nirvāṇa or the Hindu Mokṣa, although such comparisons are often difficult to maintain in the face of critical scrutiny. I suppose to adopt philosophical terminology, the term 'apotheosis' might come to mind, that being 'the highest point in development; a culmination or climax.' Another term that might be added is 'theosis', although that would not be appropriate to Buddhism. In any case, according to the various traditions, these represent a state of supreme insight into the nature of being, associated with the end of all forms of distress and suffering. In the popular mind they are represented as 'Heaven' or 'life eternal', although quite what that means is obviously elusive.

Speaking of Buddhism, in the Pali texts of Theravada Buddhism, there is a complete map or topography of the 'stages of jhana' (jhana being meditative trance per this wikipedia article.) In the Mahāyāna (East Asian and Tibetan traditions) this is expanded to the Ten Bhumis, where bhumis are like stations or stages on the Bodhisattva path that may occupy several or many lifetimes.

Some of this lore has percolated into Western culture through the engagement with Eastern traditions and various esoteric movements and sects (including the Theosophical Society in the late 19th-early 20th C). A major milestone in all that was the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, held in conjunction with the World Fair in 1893, and featuring many who would become very influential in subsequent culture - Swami Vivekananda, who toured the US by railway giving addresses; Soyen Shaku, the first Zen master to speak and reside in the US; and various others including a very young D T Suzuki who travelled as a translator and assistant to Soyen Shaku and was later to become the most influential Zen emissary to American culture. Then since the 1960's there's been a veritable explosion of interest, there are Zen and Tibetan centres all over the US and the world. (I've stayed, and sat zazen, in the Zen Centre of San Francisco, back in 2009).

Much could be said about all of this, but I think one point that needs to be made is that 'higher states' are not conceptual in nature - there can be no concept of a higher stage of jhana/dhyana, which is a barrier to our normal discursive/analytical mode of analysis. Learning this is arduous and painful, in my very limited experience. Much of this material occupies a kind of intersection of depth psychology, religious practice, and philosophical analysis (Tibetan Buddhism being a sterling example).

Hey I'll tell you one guy I think would be right up your street (although I'm not really a fan) - Brook Ziporyn.

Given this kind of esoteric insight, are esoteric positions betraying themselves when they argue their validity ? Is exclusivity crucial here ? How does our need for recognition complicate the picture ? — plaque flag

The Schopenhauer book I have mentioned, Schopenhauer’s Compass, has some interesting things to say on this. Schop is drawn to mystical insight - calls it ‘illuminism’ - but is sternly insistent that it not be confused with or taken for philosophy proper. He harshly criticises the other German idealists (Schelling, Fichte, etc) on just these grounds - that they take ecstatic insights as the basis for philosophical precepts, and so arrive at ‘theology disguised as philosophy’.

Schopenhauer argues that philosophy and religion have the same fundamental aim: to satisfy “man’s need for metaphysics,” which is a “strong and ineradicable” instinct to seek explanations for existence that arises from “the knowledge of death, and therewith the consideration of the suffering and misery of life” (WWR I 161). Every system of metaphysics is a response to this realization of one’s finitude, and the function of those systems is to respond to that realization by letting individuals know their place in the universe, the purpose of their existence, and how they ought to act. All other philosophical principles (most importantly, ethics) follow from one’s metaphysical system.

Both philosophers and theologians claim the authority to evaluate metaphysical principles, but the standards by which they conduct those evaluations are very different. Schopenhauer concludes that philosophers are ultimately in the position to critique principles that are advanced by theologians, not vice versa. He nonetheless recognizes that the metaphysical need of most people is satisfied by their religion. This is unsurprising because, he contends, the vast majority of people find existence “less puzzling and mysterious” than philosophers do, so they merely require a plausible explanation of their role in the universe that can be adopted “as a matter of course” (WWR II 162). In other words, most people require a metaphysical framework around which to orient their lives that is merely apparently true. Therefore, the theologian has no functional reason to determine what is actually true. By contrast, the philosopher is someone whose metaphysical need is not satisfied by merely apparent truths – he is intrinsically driven to seek out actual truths about the nature of the world. — Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Religion and his Critique of German Idealism by Nicholas Linares

Although in all this, I think Schopenhauer’s overall perspective and orientation is far more mystically-oriented than almost any of the subsequent generations of philosophers.

There are many disgusting things about Trump, but the most disgusting is the way he treats criminal indictments as commercial opportunities, and then bleeds his rubes to pay the legal fees. Really his depravity is bottomless.

So, we know that our ordinary understanding of what it means to experience always already includes the notion of a subject, but what justification do we have for extrapolating that ordinary linguistically enabled understanding to a larger claim there is a substantial subjective ground to the totality of what is? — Janus

Because there never is an observed without an observer. Notice this has even become manifest in atomic physics. And also please notice that I’ve acknowledged that we can treat ‘the world’ as if there were no observer for practical purposes. The mistake of naturalism is then to extend that to a metaphysical claim that we see the world as it really must be absent any observer. That is the point of The Blind Spot argument that I got a thorough bollocking over some years back but which you will be pleased to know has now morphed into a book.

It’s tempting to think that science gives us a God’s-eye view of reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes—rather than ignores or tries not to see—humanity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.

Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going, but we’ve gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative vision: scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally “see” the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine.

The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium. — The Blind Spot, abstract

You show zero interest in discussing philosophy, all your posts are on Ukraine and US politics and bear no relation to anything cited on your profile page.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history, offering funding, programs, and incentives to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy and will likely drive significant deployment of new clean electricity resources.

The GOP is determined to roll back all of this. Trump showed no interest in the environment, calling global warming a hoax.

Biden has been worse on the environment than Trump — Jack Rogozhin

Demonstrable bullshit, although I’m not going to press the point as you’re obviously trolling.

Only just now read the OP fully. I see what you’re getting at but it’s not something I’d pursue. Clearly ‘faith in Jesus’ has inspired both great kindness and enormous cruelty, great art and profound delusion.

I already quoted Feuerbach — plaque flag

And that quote makes sense to me. I’ll read the rest of that SEP entry. And I agree with your point about perspective - I only riffed on that sentence about ‘objects’ to make a related point about epistemology and ‘unknowing’ in philosophy of religion

Regardless, I think this provision of the Fourteenth Amendment applies — Ciceronianus

Does someone need to file suit in order for Trump to be found ineligible to stand? I mean, it wouldn’t automatically follow from a conviction without a separate suit being filed would it? (When McConnell declined to convict Trump on his second impeachment, he pointedly said that civil laws have other remedies for Trump’s acts. He might have been referring to that.)

I can do no better than cite the opening paragraph of WWI

“The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this: for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, or space, or causality, for they all presuppose it; and each of these, which we have seen to be just so many modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of ideas; whereas the antithesis of object and subject is the common form of all these classes, is that form under which alone any idea of whatever kind it may be, abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical, is possible and thinkable. No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.

My interpretation is that there is a subjective ground or element to everything we know about what exists. For empirical purposes, it can be bracketed out or ignored. But then to take the world as real in the absence of the observer in any ultimate sense, is a metaphysical error which takes the empirical for the absolute. That is the sense in which Husserl was later to say that Western philosophy tends to 'absolutize the scientific attitude'.

This also is the way in which Schop. draws on Vedanta, with its principle of 'the unknown knower, the unseen seer'. That has been picked up by current phenomenology in the form of the blind spot of science argument.

It's nothing personal. It's a philosophical observation.

Trouble is, it’s so unclear what idealism is. ... It usually needs God’s help. — Banno

Schopenhauer is vociferously atheist. I don't find it unclear, but I understand it takes something like a gestalt shift for it to make sense.

Insulting me makes me less likely to do anything about climate change. — Agree to Disagree

Would it be insulting to suggest that this seems a petulant response? None of this is a personal matter. How you feel about it is irrelevant, and whether 'young people blame others' is also irrelevant. Human induced climate change is a clear and present danger, and action needs to be taken to stop it. Hopefully this thread can continue to highlight more or less successul attempts to do that, and to discuss the issues involved in ameliorating climate change.

Don't change the subject. It's quite a simple question.

More another outbreak of solipsism. — Banno

Would I be correct in surmising that in your mind, idealism is necessarily solipsist?

Yes, read that! I was about to post it. Here's some of the key text:

The court determined that a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act has harmed the state’s environment and the young plaintiffs by preventing Montana from considering the climate impacts of energy projects. The provision is accordingly unconstitutional, the court said.

“This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy and for our climate,” said Julia Olson, the executive director of Our Children’s Trust, which brought the case. “More rulings like this will certainly come.”

The sweeping win, one of the strongest decisions on climate change ever issued by a court, could energize the environmental movement and usher in a wave of cases aimed at advancing action on climate change, experts say.

The ruling — which invalidates the provision blocking climate considerations — also represents a rare victory for climate activists who have tried to use the courts to push back against government policies and industrial activities they say are harming the planet. In this case, it involved 16 young Montanans, ranging in age from 5 to 22, who brought the nation’s first constitutional and first youth-led climate lawsuit to go to trial. Those youths are elated by the decision, according to Our Children’s Trust.

Ought to be a major stumbling block for Republican efforts to wind back climate change amelioration efforts in the very unlikely event that they win office.

Heidegger's perspective suggests that Dasein is specific to humans and their mode of being. He argues that humans possess a distinct form of self-awareness, consciousness, and that the ability to question the nature of existence sets them apart from other animals. While animals also have their own ways of interacting with their environments and responding to stimuli, Heidegger's focus on Dasein highlights the distinctiveness, and the plight, of human existence.

Or the appallingly poor thinking on display in parts of this thread. — Banno

Oh no! Another outbreak of idealism. (Clutches pearls.)

:chin:

I suggest that we might think of God/Jesus as an object seen from different 'perspectives.' — plaque flag

Would you say that about any other person? In what context is a person an object?

Consider the role of objectification and the dominance of the objective stance in modern culture. It is why we generally appeal to 'what is objectively the case' when attempting to establish a fact.

Within the objectively-dominated perspective, 'God' becomes one of another class of objects in the world. (Isn't just this that was criticized by Heidegger as 'onto-theology'?) Something like a cosmic film director or super CEO who can be conveniently blamed for all the bad stuff that happens in the world.

This is why any authentic spirituality, I contend, must necessarily be apophatic - the way of negation, the cloud of unknowing. The point is to enact loving-kindness, not to make it object of a theory about it. That is why any real spirituality requires participation, not just empty words, and requires an inner transformation, metanoia, real conversion (and not just flag-waving).

(See God does not Exist, Pierre Whalon, and God as Ground of Being. Also one of the very next books on my reading list, Religion and Nothingness.)

what could this REFERENT be? — KantDane21

You yourself as subject, as the one who is wondering 'what is this referent?', the immediate first-person sense of being. That doesn't need an external referent, although it only ever gains its bearings with reference to them.

I got the idea that Schop thought of humans as mechanisms from the Wiki & JSTOR articles*1, which said he denied the existence of a Soul (immaterial essence, animating principle, spirit), perhaps due to the religious baggage attached to the notion of immortal spirits. But the most general meaning of "Soul" has been the rational powers that distinguish god-like humans from mere mechanical animals. Did I get the wrong impression of Schop's contrast of Will vs Soul? — Gnomon

I recommend a recent (2014) book, Schopenhauer’s Compass, Urs App. This book draws extensively on Schopenhauer’s notes, manuscripts and correspondence, and also situates him very nicely in his historical context. You could say that Schopenhauer was a kind of religious dissident - he was very much influenced by the mystics (particularly the German Jacob Boehme) and, as is well known, by early translations of the Upaniṣads. His idea of spiritual liberation was much nearer the Hindu mokṣa than conventional religious tropes, as he proclaimed himself atheist (and the fact that he could hold the views he had, which held religious asceticism in high esteem, and still be regarded atheist says something interesting in my view. )

I agree, it need not follow and is false as can be appreciated just by merely looking at how other organisms interact with the world. — Manuel

The first sentence of World as Will and Representation: '“The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness.'

Isn't that somewhat validated by the later idea of the 'lebenswelt' or 'umwelt' of animals? As you know, this was originally conceived by phenomenology, but was then adapted by biologists. Jakob von Uexküll introduced the idea of the "Umwelt," which can be translated as "environment" or "surrounding world" (precisely the element which is said to be excluded by natural science.) The Umwelt is the subjective, experiential world of an organism – its unique perception and interpretation of its surroundings. Uexküll's concept was derived from Husserl's notion of Lebenswelt, emphasizing the organism's active and meaningful engagement with its environment. Charles Peirce's semiotic theories also explore the ways in which signs and symbols are used to create meaning in the broader organic domain. (Peirce himself is often categorised as an objective idealist.)

Unless he has in mind existence in a special sense of the word, that supposition is difficult to defend. — Manuel

He does call into question what we think we understand about the meaning of 'to exist'. But then, he is a philosopher :-)