Schopenhauer

Introduction

Everything is really water--Thales...fundamentally the world is unity. But notice this unity is precisely what is not apparent; what is apparent is the reverse, the diversity of the world, and the object of the hypothesis is to assert the apparitional nature of this diversity. Therefore [it] means the world of diversity is an apparent world; in reality the world is one.

          The bifurcation of the world into the mundane world perceived and the transcendent, "more real" world revealed by the thinking is very probably an essential consequence of thinking as such, of the existence in the human head of the "world of thought"

          The living occupy the world of nature, but the world of thought is also inhabited by the dead, and especially by the "mighty dead",...they live on, they appear in dreams and waking dreams, they are immortal--and shall we too not be immortal, in that other world? The world of thought comes to be much more real than the physical world, that men should come to be much more real than the physical world, that men should come to regard it as alone real, as the real world.

          ...at last the physical world is denuded of all value and claim to veneration and becomes a mere illusion, an appearance, a veil masking that other "real" world.

          #Heraclitus says it is an ever-living fire and the real world is the battleground for an eternal conflict and for ceaseless change. #samsara or an approximation

          [Christianity]...the history of the progressively widening of this gap between the two worlds, until it comes to mean duality: Church and State, Pope and Emperor, this world and the next, God and his creation, the individual souls of men and the Holy Spirit--all ultimately forms of that primeval duality of the world in the eyes and the world in the mind.

           [Modern Philosophy] began restoring  to this primeval duality its simplest form of expression: #Descartes' solution to the riddle of the universe is that there are two and only two existants in the world of created things: thinking substance (soul) and extended substance (matter). #Spinoza says that soul and matter are not substances and that there is only one substance, God; God is infinite and has an infinite number of modes of being; of these we know two, thought and extension; soul and matter are modes of one underlying substance. Everything is God. #Berkeley abolishes matter and declares the world to be creation of mind. Everything is Mind. #Hume asserts that our mind consists of 'impressions' and 'ideas'.

            Impressions: ideas of sensation, our perception of the physical world.
            Ideas: images of impressions, formed in thinking and reasoning
            Thus, we can have no idea of anything of which we received no impression.
            What has not been perceived cannot be known.
            Locke developed it thus:
            ideas of sensation vs ideas of reflexion

            [Causation] is the expectation that what has always been conjoined in the past will always be conjoined in the future: but you cannot know that the future resembles the past because what does not yet exist cannot be perceived: you suppose it will, but that is a matter of habit...real knowledge of the world is fragmentary.

             #Kant wanted to contradict Hume but it appeared that Hume's argument was infallible. But, Kant developed a new description of the human mind. The human mind falls into two parts: the part which perceives and the part which thinks. [particulars vs concepts] the application of concepts to particulars constitutes "synthetic judgments" aka propositions. An "analytic judgement" is one whose predicate is contained in its subject, so that its denial is a self-contradiction. Synthetic judgements are of two kinds: a priori (validated independent of experience) & a posteriori (truth or falsity determined by experience). Kant maintains that scientific, mathematical and moral judgements are a priori. The Concept of Causation is also an a priori concept and causation is a category. Let's leave Kant to another post, but the ultimate conclusion is that there are two worlds: The real world/thing in itself and the apparent world/world of phenomena

           Schopenhauer equates Kant's phenomena with Berkeley's ideas in the mind. Knowledge of oneself would be knowledge of immediate reality, we know ourselves objectively.

           But we also know ourselves subjectively, we have an inner consciousness of our own existence, and we possess feeling and desires. This inner world is "will"; the will is not God, according to Schopenhauer.

           "My body and my will are one" or my body is the phenomenal form of my will, my will is the noumenal form of my body: my body is appearance, my will the "thing in itself"

           Thus the world is a duality: the world as idea is the outer, physical world, the realm of time, space and causation--appearance, [Kant's phenomenal world]; the world as will is the inner, subjective world, not subject to forms of space and time, a unity, reality. [Kant's noumenal world or thing in itself]

           [Schopenhauer's Pessimism]...the hinge of his philosophy is the ethical assertion that will is evil and must be denied. This means that fundamentally every individual is an ego whose interest in staying alive overrides every other, including the life-interest of every other. The logical outcome of this is universal conflict. The suffering caused by this conflict is the normal and inescapable condition of life and #happiness means merely the abatement/diminution of suffering. The only real good then is extinction: the realization that the perceived universe-the world as idea- is as nothing, the conscious acceptance of the need for annihilation as the only true cure for the sickness of life.

Suffering in the World

             [def] evil/strife "is precisely that which is positive, that which makes itself papable

             [def] good/happiness "is that which is negative, the mere abolition of a desire and extiniction of pain. 

             pleasure and well-being is negative and suffering positive, the happiness of a given life is not to be measured according to the joys and pleasures it contains but according to the absence of the positive element, the absence of suffering. 

             In just the same way the life of the individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one against want or boredom, but also an actual struggle against other people. 

             

             the measure of suffering increases in man far more than the enjoyment, and it is very greatly enhanced specifically by the fact that he actually knows  of death...the animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is present incarnate. 

             Knowledge is in itself always painless. Pain affects only the will and consists in an obstruction, frustration of it: nonetheless, this frustration of the will, if it is to be felt as pain, must be accompanied by knowledge. 

             the will is the string, its frustration the vibration of the string, knowledge the sounding board, and pain the sound. 

             *** And it is right that this capacity for pain should reach its zenith only where, by virtue of the existence of reason, there also exists the possibility of the denial of the will: for otherwise it would be nothing but aimless cruelty. 

             [Misery and the imperfection of man] either become an indictment of the Creator/Divine Providence and supply material for cynicisms or under Schopenhauer's pessimism are an indictment of our own nature and will, and one calculated to teach us humilty. 

              It is the grievious sin of the world which gives rise to the manifold and great suffering of the world; whereby is meant not any physical-emipircal connection but a metaphysical one. 

              As a reliable compass for orientating yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding the world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, knowing that each of us if here being punished for his existence...[doing so]

            makes us see other men in a true light and remins us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance, charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes. 

Vanity of Existence

              Time and that perish-ability of all things existing in time that time itself brings about is simply the form under which the will to live, which as thing-in-itself is imperishable, reveals to us the vanity of its striving. 

              That which has been no longer is; it as little exists as does that which has never been. But everything that is in the next moment has been. Thus the mose insignificant present has over the most insignificant present has over the most significant past the advantage of actuality. 

              Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past...were we not secretly conscious in the profoundest depths of our being that we share in the inexhaustible well of eternity, out of which we can for ever draw new life and renewed time. 

             *** the greatest wisdom consists in enjoying the present and making this enjoyment the goal of life, because the present is real and everything else is imaginary. (But you could also call this mode of life a folly if  what is the payoff for the effort of living in the moment if it disappears so completely and so quickly...)

             Our existence has no foundation on which to rest except the transient present. THus its form is essentially unceasing motion, without any possibility of that repose which we contrinuously strive after...existence is typified by unrest. 

           ***The most perfect manifestation of the will to live...must crumble to dust and its whole essence and all its striving be palpably given over at last to annihilation--this is nature's unambiguous declaration that all the striving of this will is essentially vain. If it were something possessing value in itself, something which ought to unconditionally exist, it would not have non-being as its goal. 

The Antithesis of Thing-in-Itself and Appearance

             Thing in Itself signifies that which exists independently of our perception, that which actually is. To Democritus it was matter, fundamentally this is what is still was to Locke; to Kant it was =X; to me it is will. 

              Every dogmatic transcendental philosophy is an attempt to construe the thing in itself to the laws of appearance. 

              Because everything in nature is at once appearance and thing in itself it is consequently susceptible to a twofold explanation, a physical and a metaphysical. 

• physical is always in terms of cause
• metaphysical always in terms of will

               The degree and tendency of a man's intelligence and constitution of his moral character could perhaps be traced back to purely physical causes...Metaphysically on the other hand, the same man would have to be explained as the apparitional form of his own utterly free and primal will, whih has created for itself the intellect appropriate to it; so that all his actions...are nonetheless to be attributed solely to him.

               We complain of the darkness in which we love out our lives: we do not understand the nature of existence in general; we especially do not know the relation of our own self to the rest of existence. Not only is our life short, our knowledge is limited entirely to it.