ABSTRACT
In our original awareness of the world, we are each on our own: I do not experience your experience, nor do you experience mine. The fi rstperson standpoint is our permanent location, and as the psychiatrist R.D. Laing once noted, we are consequently invisible to one another as consciousnesses (Laing 1967: 18). The initial line of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation a rms this fi rst-person standpoint’s epistemological primacy with the extreme statement ‘The world is my representation’ (Schopenhauer 1818: §1, 3).
