The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [89]
The distinctive way we humans act is by knowing, but what we share with all other living beings is much more important. At a deeper glance I am what I will, even if then I must admit that I do not know who I am. The word ‘I’ shows again, in a clearer way, its double meaning: the knower and the known. Schopenhauer tells us that the known is will, and that it is never really known.
The Schopenhauerian Console
For Schopenhauer decisions are taken away from consciousness. I can foresee the consequences of my actions, but I never observe the causes of my decisions nor the decisional actions themselves. Nevertheless, I am those decisions.
Isn’t it true that sometimes we guess exactly what a person is going to do? We know his or her character, we see the situation’s motifs, and then we accurately predict his actions? Sometimes we perceive noticeably what causes others to behave in a certain way. And this isn’t a particularly amazing feat; if John’s being an ass again then he’s probably going to offend someone at the party—quite predictable.
Not to mention Zelda’s characters. I’ve had some problems figuring out how to hit the spiders in The Ocarina of Time without being hit back (I know, I suck); but after I figured it out, the spiders gently let themselves be killed. The game characters in particular have very stable characters (if you allow me the play on words), even if in some cases it may not be that simple to find out regularities of behavior, patterns of interaction.
We have to infer others’ wills from outside—in order to know others’ characters we must work them out using clues. But when it comes to ourselves things are different; we have a direct feeling of will proper. We listen to its ‘voice’ forthright; we have to infer nothing, we need no clues. We simply listen and act accordingly (pretty much as it happens whenever Link is given a command).
To Schopenhauer this is a key to fully understand who we are, what we want. We hear our proper will as if it is another’s. Because of this, its decisions are not transparent to us. Either we want to discover what our character is, and we have to carefully observe the way we make decisions, or we directly pay attention to our inner voice. In both cases we must recognize ourselves as strangers. This is because will is not consciousness.
Daniel Dennett criticized what he called the Cartesian theater, a theory of the human mind stipulating that inside our brain there is a theater (an I-max theater maybe!) where our conscious self attends to the spectacle projected by our senses, and then chooses how to behave.66 French founder of modern philosophy René Descartes (from whom ‘Cartesian’ comes) believed that man is made of body and mind; while the body is ruled by physical laws, as any other material entity, the mind is absolutely free to will whatever it wants. The problem with this approach is to explain how a completely constrained body and an absolutely free mind can coordinate to cause one and the same act every second of life. It seems like one man is too small for both of them.
In a similar fashion we could talk of a ‘Schopenhauerian Console’, where consciousness projects the world to will, to a will that is outside this world. This outside will then gets the joypad into its hands (a wii-ll mote? Any takers?) and plays our life. What is the originality of the Schopenhauerian Console with respect to the Cartesian theater? That consciousness and will are here two distinct entities in interaction. It’s not a matter of mind and body as in Descartes. Our body is itself felt in two ways, consciously as part of the world we live (what we usually call the material body, that could eventually be substituted by a virtual body like Link), and also as the source of will. To Schopenhauer there is the world in which we consciously live and a ‘real’ world from which will