rachmiel wrote:Could you prove/disprove the existence of something that was not observed by a mind?
There's a curious role-reversal going on here. On the philosophy forum I post to many of the contributors are scientific realists, as are many people in the secular West. Their basic assumption is that the Universe exists regardless of whether anyone is observing it or not. It is, after all, a common-sense attitude - we know that the earth existed for billions of years before h. sapiens came along, and so on.
In that forum, I argue against this idea quoting the following passage:
'Everyone knows that the earth, and so the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'
Schopenhauer's defense of Kant on this score was twofold. First, the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical inquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.
The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.
This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.
Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them.
That is from Bryan Magee's book on Schopenhauer. (There's an appendix in that book comparing Schopenhauer with Buddhism and Vedanta, and it's well-known that Schopenhauer viewed his philosophy as convergent with them in this regard.)
Almost nobody gets that point when I make it on philosophy forum. And that's because most of them have imbibed scientific realism with their mother's milk. They're so wedded to a realist attitude that they can't begin to question it - not without some kind of major gestalt-shift or enlightenment experience of their own. (Magee notes just after that passage that attaining insight into these kinds of ideas through Eastern philosophy generally takes years of study and discipline.)
But the curious thing is, there's almost an opposite attitude on this Forum. Here, the reality of the world is frequently dismissed, usually with an appropriate aphorism from Nagarjuna, as though 'everyone knows' that the world is simply 'empty appearance' and insubstantial. And that bothers me for the opposite reason - I actually happen to think that through science, many things have been discovered which
really were unknown to the ancients, regardless of their perceptiveness.
That's why the 'two truths' doctrine makes so much sense to me. It says there are conventional truths, conventional realities, which are consistent and coherent in their own terms, even if they're
ultimately empty. It may be a magic show, but there are more and less skilled magicians, if you like.
