Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics Quotes

“and limited by a rational, benign plan, one where we cannot touch bottom, but which is nevertheless the locus of our dark genesis. ... Something which comes from the depths has its own numinosity ... The primitive has power, on which we need to draw, or before which we stand in awe, even as we may have to limit it, resist it. Charles Taylor, explaining the ethos of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in A Secular Age”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics

“Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed. ... The afferent nerves are images, the brain is an image, the disturbance travelling through the sensory nerves and propagated in the brain is an image too. ... To make of the brain the condition on which the whole image depends is in truth a contradiction in terms, since the brain is by hypothesis a part of this image. Henri Bergson, in Matter and Memory (1896)”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics

“Schopenhauer’s metaphysics isn’t a form of dual-aspect theory, but idealist through and through: it entails both subjective idealism—the physical world of objects in spacetime existing only as images in an individual subject’s consciousness—and objective idealism—the world-in-itself being constituted by volitional experiential states.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics

“Schopenhauer is, in fact, an idealist with regard to the physical world—i.e. the world of material objects interacting with one another in spacetime, according to causal laws. For him, this physical world exists only insofar as it consists of mental images—representations—in the consciousness of the observing individual subject. It has no existence beyond this individual subject.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics

“The only unifying ontological claim Schopenhauer makes is that everything is intrinsically will, representation being merely how the will presents itself to observation.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics

“Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is characterized by a partition of the world into two categories, which he calls ‘will’ and ‘representation,’ respectively. The latter is the outer appearance of the world: the way it presents itself to our observation. The former, on the other hand, is the world’s inner essence: what it is in itself, independently of our observation.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics