I just started reading a book with selections from Schopenhauer. To my mild surprise, I *love* what I’ve read so far. Half the time it’s made me think “Hey! That’s just what *I* believe too!”, and the other half I’ve thought “Oh! Great idea! I should have thought of that!”

In particular, his view of the relationship between direct intuitive perception and reasoning about concepts is close to mine.

My belief is that there is a world out there that we experience at a pre-verbal level. Then when we *think* about this experience, we frame it conceptually. That means, essentially, that we form abstract concepts to represent what we experienced. Those concepts are a model of our direct knowledge, but are no longer direct, and there is always a small gap between the concepts we have and the truth we are trying to capture using them. That gap can be exploited to create liar’s paradoxes and other strange things.

Schopenhauer adds that by means of concepts we can make our knowledge last beyond the experience. We can reason about what we’ve seen without having to *see* it right now. We just manipulate the concepts logically and follow where they lead. But we do well to remember that we aren’t dealing with the direct perception anymore, and so there is always the possibility of error being introduced — even if our conclusions are based on valid deductions, they may not map directly to what we *meant* by the concepts.

For example, suppose I want to understand justice. I may start by defining it, but I will test the definition’s plausibility by “trying it out” — by thinking of examples in which I just *know* what justice is, and checking to see if the conceptual definition I am using matches that knowledge. Then I work out the consequences of my concept of justice, abstractly, without worrying much about intuition. Finally, I check the consequences against what I intuitively know about justice again. At this point, I may say, “No, that’s wrong somehow. That must not really be what I meant by justice”, or I may say, “Wow, that seems right, but I never noticed that before. Now that I notice it, I can see (intuitively) that it is true.”

Is this exactly how things work? Of course not. (It couldn’t be. My description is itself an abstract conceptualization of how things work, and so if it is true there must be a gap between what I’ve said here and how things *really* are.)

But I think it’s pretty close.