Schopenhauer wrote at a time when faith in science and an attendant optimism about humanity were gaining steadily in influence, and his writings must be understood as a powerful countercurrent probing the flaws of this belief, highlighting the limits of human knowledge, and stressing the forces within the human psyche that were—and remain—largely unappreciated.
There is still a view of the world, the so-called "objective scientific view" that considers the observable, measurable, quantifiable world of matter (chemical properties) as disectable under the microscope - or the telescope (when it comes to man's curiosity about the heavens and "outer" cosmos).
And yet the representation of the entire world is dependent upon animal consciousness. Whatever we experience as the objective world can only be a representation of sensory data that has been filtered through our mental faculties. This is true for all animal life.
Again I refer to "Schopenhauer's Encounter with Indian Thought":
For Schopenhauer,the forms of intuition, time and space, together with causality, the only form of the understanding (Verstand), according to which all phenomena are connected to one another, exist a priori as the structure of the mind. They are subjective.
Kant writes, "If the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us."
However, we are normally quite unaware of this so that space, time, and causality seem to be external and objective; earlier European philosophers, Schopenhauer argues, took them as the very nature of things, standing above and determining the world order.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note that the terms enclosed in three question marks are such that I lack familiarity with, and I do not intend to suggest otherwise. I can only understand through the context in which they are appearing in the text. I would encourage Holden to offer us some of his insight into such terms. (Thanks in advance).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The world may be understood in its empirical reality, as the senses and mind present it to consciousness and as natural science studies it, or it may be understood from the standpoint of philosophical truth and in its transcendental ideality. The world as representation is analogous to the relative truth of the everyday world (???samvrti-satya
) of the Indians. There can be real knowledge "only of what exists in and for itself, and always in the same way," just as the Indians demand intrinsic being,
svabhāva
. Schopenhauer maintained that the distinction between degrees of reality is expressed in Plato’s Myth of the Cave, "the most important passage in all his works," the meaning of which is that the world that appears to the senses has no true being but only a ceaseless becoming. This is also, he argues, a principal teaching of the Indians in the form of the doctrine of māyā, "by which is understood nothing but what Kant calls the phenomenon as opposed to the thing-in-itself."
By making it possible to distinguish true being from representation, the hidden thing-in-itself from appearance, Kant revealed with brilliant new clarity the truth of these ancient insights. Without this separation of the real from the ideal there can in future be no serious philosophy.
Thus a teaching of Two Truths, shared by the Mādhyamika and Advait philosophers, finds a counterpart in the transcendental idealism of Schopenhauer. This brings us to the question of the relationship between the two different "truths" or levels of being. Here again we find a large measure of agreement: for all three of the teachings under review there is and can be no relationship. For Schopenhauer, causality is limited to the sphere of representation, which is in fact its creation; it cannot go beyond this to form a link with the being-in-itself of the world. For Advaita Vedānta and Hindu thought in general, there is and can be no common ground between the unreal and the real.
And for Nāgārjuna and the Madhyamaka, the world (
samsāra
) is nothing but reality (nirvāna) wrongly apprehended; it has no true being of its own, so there can be no question of relationship. Between the relative and the absolute truth, empirical reality and transcendental ideality, there exists no linkage. Like dream and waking consciousness, they exist on distinct planes and cannot be related.
And yet we have seen that the world cannot be dismissed as simply nonexistent. In consequence, its reality-status becomes shrouded in uncertainty, and all three of the teachings we are concerned with enter an area from which ambiguity cannot be eliminated. Which of the two truths is "true" at any given time and in any given context depends on the standpoint from which it is viewed. Schopenhauer speaks of the riddle constituted by the mysterious "world-knot," which binds together in an apparent unity the real and the ideal, and of "this dreamlike quality of the whole world" and "the phantasmagoria of the objective world." The world we know through the senses is, and it also is not; its comprehension is "not so much a knowledge as an illusion."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is no secret that theoretical physicists have been sounding quite similar to religious mystics for many decades now, so there is not so much a "faith in science", but a certain understanding that our truths are all relative in some way.
We observe impressions of sensory data filtered through the nervous system and never the actual so-called "objective world".
Let us not forget that exposure to the elements will cause the death of the creature in whose consciousness the entire cosmos depends. Quite an incomprehensible riddle, that the empirical world that scientists claim to observe, measure, and quantify depends on the thin "psychic thread" of concious subjectivities.
Aa an example of pop-culture's fascination with such paradoxes, think of the film, The Matrix. It brought transcendental idealism to the masses, no? There was also Total Recall (the film adaption of Philip K Dick's story).