Irv Yalomwas a great guest. We had a fun, lively conversation that went back and forth between philosophy, biography, and psychotherapy. You can hear the archived version of the episodehere.

我想扩展一下我们在这一集里刚刚触及的话题。I discussed it briefly but not in great detail in mypre-show post. I'm thinking about where values and meaning come from and whether a metaphysics anything like Schopenhauer's has the resources to make room for value and meaning. I think that the answer is yes. And I suspect that Schopenhauer fails to see this, if he does, because he buys into a commonly held, but I think deeply mistaken criticism of naturalism. I'll call it the "you can't get something from nothing" criticism.

I probably should say what I mean by naturalism. Very roughly, by naturalism I mean the view that there is no order but the natural order. All there is, has been, will be, or even could be has its being in and through the natural order.

I have to admit that it's something of a stretch to call a transcendental idealist, like Schopenhauer, a naturalist. Certainly Kant, one of Schopenhauer's two great philosophical heroes -- Plato was the other -- was no naturalist. For Kant the natural order is "phenomenal" rather than "noumenal." As such, the natural order has no transcendental reality, as Kant would have put it. The natural order is for him empirically real, but transcendentally ideal. There is a transcendentally real order. That is where the noumenal ding an sich resides. But for Kant, the noumenal ding an sich is no part of the natural order. Indeed, it is the ultimate, but unknowable and not positively characterizable ground of the natural order. The noumenal realm, whatever it is, is precisely the kind of thing that decidedly doesnothave its being in and through the natural order for Kant.

叔本华反对康德关于本体秩序的很多观点。与康德不同的是，他确实认为我们有一种"认知"途径来了解"叮"这个词。当然，他坚持认为我们的进入是通过内在的感觉，而不是抽象的概念。他还大胆地提出了许多关于丁亥年性质的正面说法。例如，他告诉我们，意志本身是一种盲目的、漫无目的的、不受约束的奋斗。当然，像康德一样，叔本华坚持认为“自然”在某种意义上是现象性的而不是本体性的。和康德一样，他声称现象级的自然世界不是终极现实，在很多方面也不像终极现实。例如，在自然世界中，我们的行为是由“动机”因果决定的。动机本身是因果决定的。但意志的“内在本质”，即自在意志，是自由的，而不是决定的。

So Schopenhauer is probably not a naturalist in any straight-forward contemporary sense. Certainly he has metaphysical views that would be jarring to any thoroughly modern naturalist. Most thoroughly modern naturalists don't go in for transcendental idealism. Quite the reverse! Most thoroughly modern naturalists are prone to realism, rather than idealism.

Still, at least this particular thoroughly modern naturalist, finds at least the spirit, if not the letter, of Schopenhauer's views quite amenable to naturalism. In particular, Schopenhauer seems to believe that way down at the very foundation of all that exists, is a realm in which neither meaning, nor value, nor valuing yet subsists. All that is or could be must find its being in and through a basic reality in which there is nothing normative, nothing of value and nothing of meaning.

Now many friends of meaning, value, normativity and the like reject naturalism just because they think something like the following: Thereisvalue in the world. Naturalism says that at the fundamental level of being, whatever that is, there is no value. You can't get something from nothing. That is, no value in, entails no value out. Ergo, naturalism must be false. Because if naturalism were true, the existence of value in the world would be entirely inexplicable.

博物学家至少有两种选择。要么接受你不能从无到有的事实，坚持认为这个世界没有意义和价值。无论叔本华是不是当代意义上的博物学家，有时他似乎肯定接受这样一个前提，即你不能从无价值中获得价值，并得出结论，因此世界是没有价值的。然而，他的观点是如此丰富和复杂，我不认为这是对他的观点的最好的最终解释。Still let's assume for the moment that I've got that roughly right.

But a naturalist can, I think, simply reject the claim that you can't get value out of non-value. How could that happen? This post has already gotten longer than I intended, so I'll try to be brief about what is really a very long story. The key is human desires and aspirations and our relation to them. More particularly, the answer has to do with whatJohn Fischerreferred to onour episode about freedomas our capacity toreflectively ownour desires and other motivating aspirations more generally. There's a very complicated story to tell about this all. Very, very briefly (and inadequately), when an agent reflectively owns a desire, she endows it with a special status. That desire now "speaks" for the agent and functions as a source ofreasonsfor the agent. It's no longer merely one among the agent's inner pushes and pulls, vying for control of the agent's life. Rather, it now expresses something about the agent's rational commitments, about where the agent stands. By locating herself just here rather than there, the agent stakes out commitments. Staking out commitments opens her to rational criticism by others. She entitles others (and herself) toholdher to those commitments. This is the kind of thing I had in mind when I referred in our conversation on the air to "the creative force" of the human will and intellect. We are the kinds of creatures that cancreate values. And we can do this, I claim, even though we exist only in and through a more fundamental reality that is itself entirely devoid of value and valuing.

That does mean that our values aren't built into the fundamental fabric of nature. Since we aren't, how could they be? But it also means that our values have at least as secure a place in the natural order as we do. Moreover, as I said in an earlier post, we don't need nature to vindicate our values for us. We vindicate them ourselves. And we do so by deploying the merely natural powers of valuing with which nature has endowed us. I write about this a lot more in my book in progress calledToward a Natural History of Normativityby the way.