Sunday, March 17, 2013

Proprioception, Doing, Noumenon

As has been previously discussed, the awareness 'I can do' is, more accurately, 'I can try to do'.  So, by reducing the latter to the former, Schopenhauer obscures the implicated awareness of 'I do', an awareness that is neither his 'representation', nor his 'self-consciousness', the two kinds of self-awareness that he entertains.  Rather, it is Proprioception, which, as has been previously detailed here, is the internal imaging of the motile processes of an organism, the fundamental function of which is homeostatic, i. e. the maintaining of the integrity of the organism.  Accordingly, what he calls 'representation' is primarily a proprioceptive awareness of a localized encounter with some external influence, while his 'will' is the initial exertion of Doing, abstracted from the subsequent phases of the process as their 'cause'.  Without a recognition of Proprioception, the 'I do' remains, for Schopenhauer, a noumenal abyss between 'I can do' and 'done', i. e. between Will and Representation.

No comments:

Post a Comment