At the end of the last thrilling episode of our journey through the tangled wilderness of The Nibelung’s Ring, Richard Wagner, fleeing from the kingdom of Saxony with a price on his head, had just reached safety in Switzerland. There he would remain, scraping by on the money he could make from writing and trying to dodge debt collectors, while laboring away at a gargantuan tetralogy of operas that nobody was interested in producing. It was a difficult time for him, and that turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened.
This is a common experience for a certain kind of clueless young intellectual. I can say this with some confidence because I went through it when I was in my twenties. It can happen any time you get chucked out of a comfortable situation in which all your bills are paid by other people, and suddenly have to keep yourself fed, clothed, and housed by your own efforts. It’s one of the more effective ways to shed the kind of silly beliefs about life that become fashionable among those who don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
In my case, the end of my first stint at college and the beginning of my marriage did the trick. Wagner, typically, did it on a grander scale than most, by leading a failed revolution, being dismissed from his comfortable job as Kapellmeister to the royal court of Saxony, and becoming persona non grata in most of the potential markets for his skill set. The results were similar, however, as they generally are: the clueless young intellectual has to pay a little more attention to realities and a little less attention to abstract notions about realities, and becomes a little less clueless in the process. There’s usually some amount of whining involved—I’m embarrassed to say this was true of me—and here, too, Wagner did it on a bigger scale than most.
Very often, though, what happens is that somewhere in there, usually when the whining trickles away into silence and the not-quite-so-clueless young intellectual realizes that nobody else in the world is listening, an idea, a teaching, a book, or some other mental stimulus shows up, and jolts the intellectual out of the mud wallow he’s dug for himself. That happened to Wagner, too.
His reaction was, surprisingly enough, no more grandiose than most. In his case it was a book that gave him the necessary jolt; he proceeded to study that book with the kind of passionate intensity teachers wish their students would demonstrate now and then, and his letters show that he grasped what the book had to say more completely than most, but that’s not uncommon at all in such situations. From that point on, though Wagner didn’t precisely change his ways—he kept on borrowing money and not paying it back, for example—he flung himself into work with renewed vigor, and the tetralogy shed its facile Feuerbachian optimism to embrace a richer, more tragic, and more realistic view of things.
The book that did the trick for Wagner was Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation) by Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner was far from the only person in his time to be shaken to the core by Schopenhauer’s work; it had an immense impact across the cultures of Europe and the European diaspora. Art, literature, music, and popular culture all echoed with the impact of Schopenhauer’s thought. The only field in which it made no impact at all was the one that mattered to Schopenhauer, which was philosophy.
To understand the Schopenhauer phenomenon, it helps to step back a little and recall the dreadful predicament that assailed European philosophy in the wake of Immanuel Kant. Building on two centuries of hard work by previous philosophers, Kant showed with ruthless clarity that nearly everything we think we know about the world is secondhand guesswork. There really is a world out there—that much he also showed—but our perceptions of it have to go through three filters: first, the filter of the senses, which only pick up on a tiny fraction of what’s happening out there; second, the filter of the nervous system, which folds, spindles, and mutilates the input of the senses so that it can be processed by the mind and third, the filter of the mind, which is so packed with genetic, cultural, and personal interpretive schemes that it’s a wonder that any information about the world gets through at all.
As I noted two weeks ago, every philosophical tradition makes this discovery sooner or later. In healthy, mature traditions, after a period of lively debate that shows that, in fact, we really can’t know that much about the universe, philosophers turn their efforts away from grand schemes about the nature of everything and refocus on how to live in a world where the nature of everything is exactly what we can’t know.
The focus of the resulting philosophies varies from tradition to tradition. In China, where the decisive turn appears in the writings of Lao Tsu, later philosophy focused on social and political life, seeking to solve the problem of how human beings can live together in relative peace. In India, where the turn is already evident in the Upanishads, later philosophy focused on mysticism and the quest to live in harmony with the Divine. In Greece, where the turn took place during the lifetime of Socrates, later philosophy focused on ethics and explored ways for the individual to live in harmony with himself.
What direction Western philosophy might take in response to the same shattering discovery of the limits of the human mind is anyone’s guess. It may turn out that our philosophical tradition is the exception—that instead of dealing with the challenge, as other philosophical traditions have done, it will plug its eyes and ears with its fingers, chant “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!” at the top of its lungs, and continue to sink into the mire of incoherence and uselessness until it vanishes from sight. As I mentioned in an earlier post, however, there have been a few noble exceptions to that habit, and the most influential of them was Arthur Schopenhauer.
A few biographical details may help. Schopenhauer was born in 1788 to a wealthy businessman and his ambitious wife in what was then the tiny German-speaking city-state of Danzig and is now the Polish city of Gdansk. His parents gave him a world-class education, sending him to study in France and England so that he would be fluently trilingual and giving him ample support in his intellectual development, though that and a fat trust fund were nearly the only benefits he got from them. A troubled, unhappy child, he grew up to be an exceedingly difficult person, though the only thing he had in common with Wagner was arrogance.
He graduated with a doctorate in philosophy in 1813 with a dissertation titled On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which picked up where Kant left off and set out to answer a deceptively simple question: how do we know that a statement is true? What gives us sufficient reason to say that such-and-such is the case? It was a bravura performance, but he was just warming up. He spent the years from 1814 to 1818 in Dresden, then a center of intellectual activity, writing at a feverish pace. The result, The World as Will and Representation, set out to make sense of human existence from the perspective Kant had opened up.
He had a secret weapon, and it’s one that very few other Western philosophers since his time have ever taken up. In his time the riches of Asian philosophy had just begun to find their way to intellectuals in the West, where (like Schopenhauer) they were embraced eagerly by people in nearly every field of thought but philosophy. To this day most Western philosophy prances about pretending that nobody east of the Jordan River ever had a deep thought. Schopenhauer was the great exception. He had a copy of the first European translation of the principal Upanishads, the fundamental texts of Indian philosophy, and took them just as seriously as he took Plato or Kant. That gave Schopenhauer access to a much richer body of thought than his rivals, and helped make The World as Will and Representation the astonishing work that it is.
So Schopenhauer published his masterwork, and waited for the world to congratulate him. It didn’t. Sales of the book were extremely slow. He moved to Berlin to launch a career as a university professor, and failed. After a while he settled in Frankfurt, where he lived alone except for a succession of pet poodles, took out his frustrations by squabbling with his neighbors, patronized the local sex workers and the best restaurant in town, and played the flute for an hour before supper every day.
The philosophical world never did pay him the least attention. After the collapse of the 1848-1849 revolutions, though, a great many formerly clueless intellectuals who got put through experiences similar to Wagner’s suddenly found that Schopenhauer made a lot more sense than what they had been reading. In the decade before his death in 1860, he finally got the acclaim he’d waited for all those years. From then until the outbreak of the Second World War, he was an extraordinarily influential figure across the spectrum of Western intellectual culture; if you know Schopenhauer, you can find references to his work all through the literature of the time. (His fingerprints are all over H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, for example.)
One reason that WWR (as we’ll call Schopenhauer’s main book from here on) was so influential is that it’s written in almost superhumanly clear and readable German. Schopenhauer’s exposure to French and English prose had cured him of most of the bad habits that make so many German writers a chore to read, and he used lively metaphors and ordinary vocabulary in place of the tortured Latinisms and labored seriousness that stands in the way of understanding so many German philosophers. The English translations I’ve read never really catch that, but then it would take a writer as good as Schopenhauer to translate his prose into equally vibrant English, and such writers are in short supply. Nonetheless the existing translations are quite readable—much more so than even the best translations of Hegel, just to cite one obvious example.
Yet the great strength of WWR is its content, not its style. As noted already, Schopenhauer took Kant as his starting place. Here’s the opening passage of the book:
“‘The world is my representation’: this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can being it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him. It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels the earth; that the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself.”
With this, all the handwaving about intellectual intuition, all the claims that certain gifted people can know for certain the direction of history and the inner workings of the Absolute, falls to the ground in a smoking heap. What remains is this: what can we know about ourselves and the world that we seem to be living in, given that all we have to go on is a jumbled mess of secondhand representations? How should we then live?
Schopenhauer starts by examining our experience even more closely than Kant did. Is there really nothing we experience directly, without representations getting in the way? There’s one thing, and you experience it at every moment.
Move your hand. Now move it again. Notice that you don’t have to tell it, “Hand, move!” Nor do you have to imagine it moving, or come up with any other way of representing the movement to your hand. You just move it. The will is the one thing we encounter directly, without some kind of representation getting in the way. (We can create representations of the will—the word “will” is an example—but those representations are not the same thing as the act of willing.)
So our own will is the one thing we encounter that isn’t just a representation. Fair enough, says Schopenhauer. What happens if we assume, for the sake of argument, that this is true of everyone and everything else? What if we take our own experience of willing as our one encounter with the world as it actually is, our only access to the thing-in-itself beyond all representations?
What happens then is that the world begins to make a kind of sense very different from the one that Hegel tried to impose on it. First of all, the will doesn’t think—thinking is the art of juggling with representations. It doesn’t feel—feeling is the experience of reacting to representations. It doesn’t remember—memory is the process of comparing present representations to past ones. The will does none of these things. It simply acts.
Second, it can succeed in its acts or it can fail. When does it fail? When something interferes with it. If will is the essential nature of things, then what can interfere with will? Will. So the will can be in conflict with itself—and that means, in turn, that the essential nature of things can be in conflict with itself. It can trip over its own feet. Out the door, in other words, go all those attempts to define the essential nature of reality in terms surreptitiously borrowed from the Christian god. Out the same door go Hegel’s attempt to claim that the Absolute is unfolding in historical time in some wonderful direction that he can predict.
Third, what happens when the will fails? It reacts to its failure. You notice that there’s a rock in the path when you stub your toes on it. The “Ow!” that results is the basic form of the act of consciousness. We see only those things our vision can’t penetrate; our sense of touch can only tell us of things that resist the pressure of our bodies. So will is how we experience what actually exists, and consciousness—the ability to create representations—derives from it. Since consciousness is secondary and the product of failure, we can never know the world perfectly.
Fourth, since the will can only be conscious of what frustrates it, there is something essentially tragic in existence. Schopenhauer, being the person he was, emphasized that very powerfully. He admitted that someone who didn’t have his pessimistic outlook could rise above the tragedy of existence and affirm the universe with courage and joy—but that wasn’t something he himself was able to do, and he admitted it. It’s been said that every philosophy is an autobiography, and that’s certainly true of Schopenhauer; his own deeply unhappy life is on display here. It took others—notably the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, who drew extensively on Schopenhauer’s thought—to embrace that possibility and point out that the whole universe is in some sense an eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden.
Fifth, and crucially, there were three ways to deal with the tragic nature of existence. One is the way of affirmation just mentioned. The second is the way of negation, in which the will negates itself and enters into peace: in essence, the way of mysticism. These two are accessible only to the few. For the many, however, there is a third way, which is art. All the arts—music, painting, poetry, dance, sculpture, fiction, you name it—raise consciousness above will. When you’re looking at a painting, listening to music, reading a novel, or what have you, your will is set aside for the time being; you are attending to a sequence of conscious states that have nothing to do with you, your needs, your desires, or your fears. This allows the will to rest and experience that rare (to Schopenhauer) commodity, joy.
These are the ideas that burst over Richard Wagner like a thunderstorm in 1854, when he first read WWR. They caused him to reshape his entire conception of the Ring cycle. One of the things that made this reshaping so fascinating is that he had already begun composing the music for the first opera, The Rhinegold, in late 1853. Thus the reshaping process unfolded while he was composing. That first opera was largely Feuerbachian in its structure and meaning, though Schopenhauer’s insights began to show themselves in the last of its four scenes: Alberich, the Nibelung dwarf who was originally slated to be a mere villain, achieves a tortured majesty in the scene where Wotan takes the Ring from him, rising to a moral stature above that of the god, and the seemingly triumphant music with which The Rhinegold closes is shot through with bitter ironies and the first foreshadowings of impending doom.
The Valkyrie and the first two-thirds of Siegfried take much of their complexity from Wagner’s ongoing struggle to integrate Schopenhauer’s insights and to reach past Feuerbach’s focus on politics and society to the deeper existential and psychological dimensions that Schopenhauer had opened up. Then came a hiatus. It became clear to Wagner exactly what was going to come of the dream of a brighter future that he’d gotten from Feuerbach. After seriously considering suicide, he set the Ring aside and worked through the matter in the only way he could, by composing two more operas.
I don’t think there are any operas in the entire history of the genre more different than the tremendous celebration of life and love that is The Mastersingers of Nuremberg and the even more brilliant renunciation of existence itself that is Tristan and Isolde. That musical comparison of the two options was what Wagner had to do before he could follow his vision all the way through. Only then could he allow the Ring to end the way it had to end; only then could he let Siegfried, the Man of the Future, the ultimate Feuerbachian hero, become the total moral and personal failure that he had to be.
We’ll leave Wagner here, penning the last triumphant notes of The Twilight of the Gods, and proceed two weeks from now to the first of the operas themselves. After the last of the Ring operas, we’ll return to him, and set the stage for his final attempt to resolve the terrible conflict at the heart of his creative vision: the “fifth Ring opera,” Parsifal. In the meantime, I’d encourage any of my readers who haven’t done so already to download a copy of the librettos of the first two operas here. The orchestra is warming up, the singers are putting the last touches on their makeup, and the curtain is about to rise.
After ruining many of the Grimm’s fairy tales, I can’t help but wonder what if would be like if Disney decided the remake the entire Ring cycle as a 90 minute animated Cartoon. I am sure the contrast between it and the Bugs Bunny cartoon version would really show where we are at as a society and civilization.
John–
Would Kether, as the first emanation, therefore best be described as pure will, rather than pure awareness, if consciousness is derivative of will? I have generally seen Will associated with Geburah, though that may be referring to a lower level of will, as opposed to Divine Will
I also recall Steiner describing will, intellect, and feeling as something of a triad of functions, but they were represented (!) more as coequal, rather than one being primary over the others, and he expressed a need for balance among them. I may be confounding concepts, however, due to similar terminology.
>Some conflicts of the will produce a louder “Ow!” than others.
So, um, who or what is willing that rock?
This just further confirms for me that I need to add Schopenhauer to my reading list – I’ll probably find a German edition on archive.org – I believe he was a significant influence on the early work of Thomas Mann, too. I wondered what Goethe thought about Schopenhauer and a search turned up this article which also revealed that Goethe was friends with Schopenhauer’s mother.
Clay, now that’s a chowblowing thought if ever there was one. Bleah.
David BTL, as I see it, at least, Chokmah is will and Binah is awareness; Kether is pure being, which we cannot perceive except through will or awareness. As for Steiner, yes, that’s very much what he was saying, but he was an eager participant in the attempt to get past Kant — more subtle and thoughtful than most, but he still didn’t accept the implications of Kant’s work and so didn’t grasp what Schopenhauer was doing.
Other Owen, nah, you’ve got it the wrong way around. Will doesn’t belong to anybody. Everybody and everything is an expression of will. As Dion Fortune liked to put it, “God is pressure.”
KAN, they’ve got plenty. Schopenhauer had a huge impact on most German writers for a good century and a half after WWR first saw print; Hesse, for example, has Schopenhauer’s influence practically on every page. (Steppenwolf is the story of a man going from Schopenhauer’s pessimism to the way of affirmation, for example.) EDIT: I went looking and found a source for WWR in just about any format you prefer, here:
https://onemorelibrary.com/index.php/en/languages/german/book/moderne-westliche-philosophie-181/die-welt-als-wille-und-vorstellung-2866
For those readers who have some ability to read German, here is a parallel text version (original German side-by-side with English translation) of the libretto of Das Rheingold: https://archive.org/download/DerRingDesNibelungenPart1DasRheingold/Der%20Ring%20des%20Nibelungen%20-%20Part%201%20-%20Das%20Rheingold.pdf
And here is the libretto of Die Walküre in the same format:
https://archive.org/download/DerRingDesNibelungenPart2DieWalkre/Der%20Ring%20des%20Nibelungen%20-%20Part%202%20-%20Die%20Walk%C3%BCre.pdf
it will plug its eyes and ears with its fingers, chant “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!” at the top of its lungs
This does seem to be the preferred method of the West. Maybe in a few thousand years we’ll see the hidden virtue of it, but right now I’m not overly enamored.
What is the best English translation of Shopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation?
I put a copy of WWR on hold today. Strangely only two editions in the whole system. In my slow research into Viennese art & music at the turn of the century he has come up several times. It’s time.
Action is equated with wholeness by Arthur Young in his Rosetta Stone of Meaning. Another great Arthur. If I recall correctly, Schopenhauer talks about suspending the Will and rising to the level of pure knowledge., which you mention with the acts of affirmation, negation, and art. Affirming the universe is a bit confusing to wrap my head around practically, Maybe it is the act of living your life while elevating yourself above the Will? In other words, to be aware of the Will while it’s willing as much as possible? Negation of the Will might be the act of discerning what is not you at all times? In other words, distancing yourself from the tragedy of daily existence and saying “that is not me”. Thanks for the post JMG.
Dear JMG, this is one of your best posts.
I can recall a similar episode earlier in my career. All excited about peak oil, during the heady years of both your blog and the international movement, I did a masters degree on it. No one of course was interested in the findings, nor was there any great career path in it. So flat on my face in a cold world I landed. I was lucky enough, and hard working enough to rework my understanding of limits in another, more practical field, where I have stayed ever since. But the lesson remains – if you think you’ve found something exciting and determinative on the habits and patterns of nature, you haven’t. Even if you have, people probably won’t like it.
I also agree that if such a translation, that portrays the positive side of Schopenhaur’s thought, it would be great. I think for it to sell you’d have to entitle it “The Plato Killer” or something similar 🙂
WWR is listed as The World as Will and Idea on Project Gutenberg.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38427
Apparently there is a dispute of the best translation of Vorstellung. From Wikipedia
“There is some debate over the best way to convey, in English, the meaning of Vorstellung, a key concept in Schopenhauer’s philosophy that is used in the title of his main work. Schopenhauer uses Vorstellung to describe whatever comes before in the mind in consciousness (as opposed to the will, which is what the world that appears to us as Vorstellung is in itself). In ordinary usage, Vorstellung could be rendered as “idea” (thus the title of Haldane and Kemp’s translation). However, Kant uses the Latin term repraesentatio when discussing the meaning of Vorstellung (Critique of Pure Reason A320/B376). Thus, as is commonly done, one might use the English term ‘representation’ to render Vorstellung (as done by E. F. J. Payne in his translation). Norman, Welchman, and Janaway also use the English term ‘representation’. In the introduction, they point out that Schopenhauer uses Vorstellung the same way Kant uses it — ‘representation’ “stands for anything that the mind is conscious of in its experience, knowledge, or cognition of any form — something that is present to the mind. So our first task in The World as Will and Representation is to consider the world as it presents itself to us in our minds.”[9]”
Dear Mr. Greer,
I just finished enjoying your essay, and checked http://www.gutenberg.org. They have all kinds of translations of the works of Arthur Schopenhauer in expired copyright form available for free download. Just go to the website and load his name into the search label.
Thank you for keeping your blogspots up and running. They are a place of sanity for me.
Elizabeth Ann Kennett
>Other Owen, nah, you’ve got it the wrong way around.
Is will even higher than God? Or is literally everything, God’s will?
>I can’t help but wonder what if would be like if Disney decided the remake the entire Ring cycle
Don’t give that crowd an idea they can’t handle. Only chaos will ensue.
World as Will and Representation (WWR)
Okay, so I can kinda make some sort of sense
Out of Mr. Schopenhauer’s great treatise, yep.
Not enough to classify every other doggone
Philosopher’s works in relation to it, or even
Psychological philosophers (or the inverse) like
Viktor Frankl, but following directly on Mr. Kant,
WWR makes MUCH more sense than, say Hegel,
Or that awful man whose work my college taught,
Some sort of knuckle-dragging materialist whose
Name I can’t recall now. But, really, I’m happier
With the Tao Te Ching (which I’m told says much
The same thing), or some of the later Greeks, who
Were better tempered, if not perhaps so clear as
Mr. S., who didn’t get the respect he likely deserved.
John–
“The point of the dance is itself” is a maxim I was given by Whomever She May Be nearly ten years ago and is one with which I continue to struggle mightily. This struggle is all the more highlighted by Schopenhauer’s presentation of existence as frustrated Will. It can indeed be a challenge at times to fathom a purpose in being if frustration and pointlessness are the only things on the table.
Hi John Michael,
It’s astounding what images can reveal, and yes, to the casual observer of the painting, the young Richard appeared insufferably smug. It’s been remarked upon elsewhere that inexperience can lead a person to believing that they’re smarter than everyone else. The belief ain’t true though, and perhaps this is what was meant by the term ‘mistaken belief’? His much later image revealed more balance to his features, life can do that to people. Far less hubris there in that face.
As to the old grouch of Frankfurt, if you look closely enough at the older depiction you’ll notice that his right eye is opened wider than his left, which is suggestive of a lack of balance within his personality. Last I checked, nobody has suggested that you or I are the old grouch of (insert location here)… 🙂 Interestingly, the set of his mouth and head is suggestive to me of a person who is perpetually dissatisfied. I’ve actually met people who pull that trick, and I have a hunch they do so as a form of motivation for others to appease them – although they’re never pleased, so the effort to meet the high standards are not worth it.
Have you ever noticed that Mr Lovecraft has quite a small mouth relative to the overall size of his face? His facial expression is rather tense looking, and it makes me wonder if his personality reflected that emotional state?
The Rhinemaidens looked like a lot of trouble to me, and in threes. Too rich for my tastes. 😉
Did not Dion Fortune make a rather astute observation upon the subject of magic and will? There’s enormously good advice in those words too, for those who have the care to listen.
As to your mention of the eastern farmland last week, you’re probably right. There are always unseen currents going on under the waves. Did you notice the interest rate drop? I did mention at the beginning that they’d stuff this up.
Cheers
Chris
What I love about the World as Will and Representation is that it starts from our direct experience and winds out from there in explicit detail, with helpful metaphors as well. You can follow Schopenhauer’s line of thinking very easily as long as you’re paying attention. It’s not pretentious and impenetrable like a lot of other modern philosophy.
I’m trying to go for the way of mysticism to negate the problem of existence. It’s unspeakably difficult. The other ways are easier and more innate to me. I definitely have that schopenhauerish pessimist in me, and the aurobindish optimist as well. Well, I’ll play the game as long as it goes.
Will creates consciousness, body and mind. Body and mind pass away. The will remains. The will creates new consciousness, body and mind. And so the cycle continues.
Hi JMG,
Hoping all is well with you.
I was able to order a “Used-Good” copy of the following for under $20. It will arrive slow boat to China — weeks. It looks REALLY good.
Annotated Ring Cycle: The Rhine Gold (Das Rheingold)
by Frederick Paul Walter
Illustrated
2021
ISBN 1538136686
I have been looking for Cliffs Notes, which doesn’t seem to exist — I have looked for the next best thing. It’s been hard to find, say, 7th grade level. I need the story idiot-proofed. It is the funniest thing: I have not been able to take in but a little at a time — maybe it is just so new (to me), or my advanced age.
To pass time, waiting for the election, I have been trance-dancing to Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic✨🎤🎹🎸🥁.” The lyrics are oddly appropriate, as I wait-the-slow-wait until I get to the voting machine and type Yes for Tramp.
By the way, “liberal” (having no sense of morality whatsoever) talk-show hosts — the vast majority (if not every last one of them) — spend 99.9% of their precious air-time bashing Tramp🤗🤩. Tramp-bashing is their religion✝️🔯💰. They CANNOT NOT talk about Tramp. They are mentally-ill obsessed. I doubt they can come up with anything OTHER than bashing Tramp. I don’t know how they devise any new material. On day after the election, November 6, the hosts will fall off a cliff, having nothing to talk about. Heaven forbid they respectfully ask a Tramp-supporter, “Why do you like Tramp so much?” or “What is it about🦎KomodoDragonHarris🦎you dislike so much?”
Also, we need to spread around the assassination attempts evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Next time is “a particular Democrat’s” turn. What is so special about her? Just sayin’. (It is not like everyone isn’t already talking about the subject of assassination, including every newscaster (so much so as to feel like vomiting🤮hourly) (I am tired of gagging).
💨Northwind Grandma💨🇺🇸🤗🎹
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Roy, thank you for this!
Cliff, my guess is that Faustian culture, to use Spengler’s name for it, will suffer the fate of its namesake. A few thousand years from now it will be a dim, frightening memory.
Anonymous, good question. I’ve only ever studied the translation by E.F.J. Payne, which is capable but fussy.
Justin, delighted to hear it. It’ll be a trip.
Luke Z, Arthur Young — oh my. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while; I studied The Geometry of Meaning years ago. I should see what I can find of his works now. As for the way of affirmation, no, that’s the way of affirming the will itself — of embracing the will in all its tragedy and self-contradiction and willing it yourself. Nietzsche called it the great Yes-saying to life.
Peter, thank you! As for Plato-killing, Schopenhauer actually finds a place for Platonism within his own philosophy, and manages to make it make more sense than Plato ever did. His work really is a tour de force.
Siliconguy, yep. He’s been popular long enough that the older translations are long since out of copyright. As for Vorstellung, it really doesn’t have a good English translation, but I think “representation” is better than “idea.” The verb vorstellen comes from vor-, cognate to English fore (as in “before” or “fore and aft,”), and stehen, cognate to English stand; it means “to place before, set up before.”
Elizabeth, PG is a good source for most of the old philosophers — thank you for this.
Other Owen, to Schopenhauer that term “God” is a somewhat clumsy mythological description of the will.
Clarke, ha! Thank you for this. “Knuckle-dragging materialist” is a keeper.
David BTL, the frustration and pointlessness Schopenhauer found on the table were things he brought to the table himself. Our value judgments (and “frustrating” and “pointless” are value judgments) belong to us, not to what we’re judging.
Chris, that’s why I included their photos. Lovecraft — well, yes. We’re discussing a man who spent his entire life being terrified by salads. (Among many other things.) Both his parents died in an insane asylum, so his cosmic paranoia wasn’t completely without basis…
Enjoyer, the way of affirmation is the one that works for me, but do what keepeth thou from wilting shall be the loophole in the law!
Northwind, thanks for this. Of course the hosts can’t ask — they think their job is to tell everyone what to think, not to find out what other people think all by themselves! The irony is that they’re probably doing a better job of supporting Trump than his most enthusiastic fans — since he’s all they can talk about, they keep him front and center in the public imagination, with predictable effects.
I should have added, I wonder if Schopenhauer, having the ability to read it (which he didn’t have) to use Fortune’s approach to theodicy, and the way she deals with limits, negative evil, and positive evil, provides a way around the sadness and tragedy that Schopenhauer reached. In a way, I see resolving that challenge in your own mind, once you’ve realised it, as part of the initiation of the nadir. You reach the limits of the universe, and can realise there’s a certain pointlessness or lack of purpose to it, and then you face a choice.
JMG,
Sorry if I’m being obtuse. What is the way of affirmation, practically speaking? Or alternatively, what is the difference between the way of affirmation, and of the “great Yes-saying to life”/way of affirming the Will itself? I think there’s a gap missing in my understanding of the way of affirmation. Thanks!
Sri aurobindo has popped up now twice in quick succession. I’ve been reading psychic self defense cause frankly meth addicted bestie seems to me had opened a lot of doors and I’m trying to understand what kind of influences there are ‘out there.’ The chapter on non-humans, elementals mainly, has really gotten to me. When she describes thought forms taking shape, mothers creating guardian angels for their kids as they die, her own resentful brooding creation of a werewolf. Well I think my mother made me like an enraged reverse of a guardian angel when I was about 13 and couldn’t developmentally fulfill the needs she expected me to for her. just after I read fortuna learning she had to reabsorb it (not cut any cords as it’s cord was already cut so to speak), well YouTube sent me to someone reading aloud Sri Aurobindo who had all kinds of helpful advice about Thought Forms and then an anecdote where someone learned ‘the trick’ of dealing w self-generated manifestations of absorbing them back. (And I was not reading fortuna aloud to my phone speaker algorithm spy!) So seeing him turn up again as someone who can say the great Yes to the universe and the complicated mess of interacting variously frustrated wills makes me like him twice over. I have a bigger question about elementals and non-humans/deva kingdom i was trying to word for magin Monday but i ended up writing a long set-up backstory and then finally went to sleep. I’ll try again before next week. I sent my methy bestie the quote about art allowing someone to think of something that is not oneself and the benefit of that in resting the frustrated will. His life has gotten to be perpetually frustrated and carpentry works as art which gets him out of the constant awareness of that frustration (made worse by a trauma and drug induced schizo way which makes him the center of everything, more than his past normal). I loved that section, ‘Fifth’ about the base layer choices for how to deal with the logical steps 1-4. Thanks.
I would love to listen to Nicholas Berdyaev, Arthur Schopenhauer and John Scotus Erigena in a room, while plied with beers. To go with hermitix podcast rules. I’d include Wagner but I’m partial to Mahler or Bach. Thanks for this. Another fine piece. Is it fair to say Wagner had no other really deep influences besides Fuerbach and Schopenhauer? And wouldn’t your guess make Faustian culture follow a kind of Egyptian fate, except into intellectual as well as physical oblivion? Not even a legend? Maybe just a cautionary myth, perhaps!
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Mariette (Miow)’s surgery on 20 September be a success. May she make a full recovery and regain full use of her body. May she heal in body, soul and mind.
May The Dilettante Polymath’s eye heal and vision return quickly and permanantly, and may both his retinas stay attached.
May Tyler and Monika’s newborn baby Isabelle, whose bowels were not moving properly at birth, and who as of 9/16 has not experienced a bowel movement, be blessed with a well functioning digestive tract and be free of colic going forward.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery to treat it.
May Tyler and Monika’s newborn baby Isabelle, whose bowels were not moving properly at birth, be blessed with a well functioning digestive tract and be free of colic going forward.
May Falling Tree Woman’s son’s girlfriend’s mother Bridget in Devon UK, who has recently started to sit up and converse after more than six weeks of bedridden tracheotomy following a life-threatening fall from a horse, be blessed and healed and returned to full health.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
May Heather’s brother in law, Patrick, who is dying of cancer and has dementia, go gentle into that good light. And may his wife Maggie, who is ill herself, find the strength and peace she needs for her situation. (Update on Patrick’s condition here)
May Neptune’s Dolphins’ husband David, who lost one toe to a staph infection last year and now faces further toe amputations due to diabetic ulcers in his left foot, be blessed and healed, and may the infection leave his body for good.
May Rebecca, who has just been laid off from her job and is the sole provider for her family, quickly discover a viable means to continue to support her family; may she and her family be blessed and sustained in their journey forward.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
This discussion about Schopenhauer reminds me of a contemporary philosopher who is inspired by Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Bernardo Kastrup. He’s been trying to fight against materialism in academic philosophy.
I suspect he personally has quasi-esoteric views but tries to keep it on the down low. He’s alluded to ‘daimons’ and unembodied consciousness before.
Anyway, here’s what he said about Schopenhauer:
“Had the coherence and cogency of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics been recognized earlier, much of the underlying philosophical malaise that plagues our culture today—with its insidious effects on our science, cultural ethos and way of life—could have been avoided.”
I think you would agree with such a statement, John. However, I have some criticisms of Bernardo, he kind of reads his own philosophy into Schopenhauers. I guess that’s a common thing in philosophy, after all, Plotinus considered his philosophy to just be Platonism but today we consider it to be different than Plato’s philosophy. Philosophers always want to draw legitimacy from those who came before.
Also, Bernardo certainly has a very western-centric progressive view of history and tends to be pretty bad when it comes to his political takes.
I actually think a conversation between the two of you about metaphysics and the history of scientific materialism and occultism would be very interesting, granted that it steered clear of politics, especially the Ukraine war. If the topic moved into that territory, it would go south pretty quickly. Anyway, he has a blog as well as a website where people can submit articles. He’s had Patrick Harpur on there. If you are interested I can link his website to you.
Well, this is exciting! Wonderful summary of Schopenhauer and what he meant to Wagner. As we rub our collective hands in preparation for diving into the Ring operas themselves, you recommend downloading and reading the libretti of the first two operas. Good idea, but perhaps people might also be encouraged to do some listening? As you suggest (and many others have noted) Das Rheingold can sound a bit forced and pedestrian — no doubt for the reasons you suggest (the conflict between Wagner’s conscious level enthusiasm for Feuerbach and what his unconscious was already telling him.about the essence of the human condition — reading Schopenhauer of course brought those notions into his consciousness.). And one does have to get to know it a bit, both to understand the story and to fix the musical motives (the “leitmotifs”) into one”s head — those will be worked and re-worked right through to the penultimate chords of Die Gotterdammerung. But Die Walkure strikes the listener (at least this listener) as one of the great breakthroughs in the history of music, indeed of all art — comparable to the Marriage of Figaro and the Eroica: here is something the likes of which have never been heard before, something that goes to the heart of what it is to be a human being. The greatest recording I have ever encountered can be listened to in its entirety here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXSTNZ6yKbc. It features a roster of the greatest Wagner interpreters of the mid-20th century; the recording itself was produced in 1959 by the inimitable John Culshaw at the dawn of Decca’s golden age.
One minor quibble: you wrote that “The only field in which (WWR) made no impact at all was the one that mattered to Schopenhauer, which was philosophy.” True, I suppose for the 19th century (if one skips over Nietzsche.). But as the great Schopenhauer scholar (and Wagnerian) Bryan Magee pointed out, “Schopenhauer was the first and greatest philosophical influence on Wittgenstein, a fact attested to by those closest to him.” And Wittgenstein for better or for worse was probably the most influential philosopher of the 20th century.
WIth regards to the western response to Shopenhauer, isn’t the entire continental school with its phenomenology a continuation of this concept, or rather an exploration of how our will and awareness interact with the physical and the attempts of consciousness to awaken to itself?
Wer here
Well JMG I’ve never read these books because I don’t have a lot of free time . I am guess a simple minded man and I never liked a lot of rich “philosophers” mulling over the meaning of everything. In my opinion the most important skills and realistic outlook are the most important, go to work somewhere instead of wasting your time.
Perhaps I am ignorant of this young intellectual suddenly thrusted into the bad world because I was never an intellectual to begin with, so I honestly don’t know what you and by proxy Wagner when into…
I’ve never been a part of any “movement” because they strike as something “engineered” by someone in order to achieve some purpose, and many people in these movement strike as someone that was paid by someone to be there, just a gut feeling of mine I understand if you don’t agree.
BTW I remember my last comment I’ve made here about Trump getting assassinated by an bomb, with what is going on with these attempts and killers appearing everywhere is it still so improbable that the RNC will have a mass murder attempt or an bomb there?
If Trump is murdered before or worse after the election (he wins) what will be the reaction to this. While I am writing this mass evacuations are taking part in Poland the south of my country is under water and it is complete chaos there good greif It is just one thing after another…
Stay safe everybody Wer
Hello John,
How do you synthesise Schopenhauer’s conception of The Will within a spiritual/occult framework? Does this not transcend benign forces that supposedly lord over us? I spoke with a Neoplatonist I am rather good friends with, and he spoke to me about how Daemons/Daimones are just instruments in carrying out desire and apply no moral judgement irrespective of the wordily consequence. A contention I have with Schopenhauer, as much as I agree with him, is that although he suggests Will takes precedent over all, he will attribute ‘The Intellect’ to the human-child and ‘The Will’ is a thing that we grow into – It would suggest a more rationale, and ordered system right?
Thanks,
Planasthai
Some idle thoughts along the way, on first reading of this post:
Yes, being out in the world without a safety net is a great reality check. I thought of Marie Antoinette being reduced to actually herding sheep for a living, and then remembered the legend that Elizabeth Tudor once said she could survive if turned out on the world in her petticoat. The clueless French queen died, a failure; Elizabeth had a long and successful reign, having learned survival in a hard school as Henry’s discarded daughter.
Hegel was the drug; Schopenhauer was a dose of Narcan. As for “old grouch” in person – how was his digestion?
For his ideas on how to deal with the universe as is – Affirmation was the way of the Stoics; negation, of the early Christians, and art, the way of Classical Greece in its heyday. I think I like the Greek ways best.
P.S. How well did Schopenhauer navigate the everyday world of people and society?
Thanks for this – I particularly enjoy your dives into philosophy.
Are the paths of affirmation, negation and creativity mutually exclusive? Many people I know that I would call somewhat happy and healthy seem to have blended these paths together in their lives: some blend of acceptance that life throws ups and downs at us, that we can chose to focus on the bright side, that meditation and spiritual inquiry can provide both solace and inspiration, and that some or many forms of creativity provide their own enjoyment and reward. I appreciate that a few people specialize in one or other of these paths, but don’t most human beings, improvising generalists as we are, stumble into some sort of blend?
Good to know also that Schopenhauer understood that his own somewhat melancholic personal disposition shaped his thinking. I’ve often wondered what would have happened in western history if philosophy had only attracted the sunny optimists with a heaping-helping of happy brain chemicals! I’m guessing those sorts of people don’t want to spend too much time over-thinking things though 🙂
I clearly need to get around to reading Schopenhaeur closely eventually.
On Platonism… Lloyd Gerson did an interesting lecture recently entitled “Taking Plato Seriously: Proclus as Exegete.” The title comes from a hostile critic of Plato who insisted that “If you take Plato seriously, you end up with Proclus.”
Again, this is coming from a place of ignorance of Schopenhaeur, so I could be way off base. But it certainly seems that Will and Representation can be understood as Life and Intellect, the second two terms of the Intelligible Triad, with the mere being that unites both Will and Representation being, um, Being, the first term of the triad. The henads and the ideas, then, are simply Wills which are prior to and vastly more powerful than our own, ultimately arising from the unimaginable source which transcends being and non-being. Of course, Being, Life, and Intellect are also known by their Hebrew names, Kether, Binah, Chokhma…
Oh, I meant to include a link to Gerson’s talk, for those interested in listening to audio lectures–
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLSNU_0L4MA&t=789s
I’ve made several unsuccessful attempts at tackling the Payne translation of TWWR. It doesn’t help that Schopenhauer begins by insisting that the reader first read Kant, or at least his principle works. This could end up with going all the way back to Plato, or maybe even the Pre-Socratics. I’ve proceeded by seeing how much I can absorb of TWWR itself without that going down that nearly infinite regress back to Plato and beyond, assigning myself a small but do-able daily dose. Consider it work on will with a small “w.” I have skipped back to the last section of Vol. 1, the critique of Kant, because that’s what A.S. seems to be recommending early on. A.S. does have a sharp wit that comes through nicely at times. All this for Wagner?
I think the way of mysticism can be scaled down, to the kind of negation of will required by those in recovery groups. I wonder if Schopenhauer was ticking away in the background anywhere in the formation of AA?
The arts seem to have been watered down in a negative way with television. People watch it for that negation of will. The other arts are different than that and still require imagination to be used in some ways.
This leads me to distraction and a point made by Randomactsofkarma in last weeks comments that I think can tie in with Schopenhauer’s famous pessimism: ” …I agree that sadness and fear can be channeled into activity, though for me, I think the activity is usually (subconsciously) intended to be a distraction.”
Distraction can be healthy to a degree. For instance in the Octagon Society work, the focus is on 15 minutes or so of intense journaling on matters of anger, shame, grief, and the like that impacted our lives. More than that ends up being counterproductive. Then it is time to move on. A distraction can be good.
When it comes to making art of any kind, and getting into that flow state. this becomes a healthy distraction, as you really start engaging with something and forget about your problems. Speaking for myself, I’ve found that when I’m not as focused on my problems, they are more likely to fix themselves as often as not, and the thing I was obsessively worrying about disappears. The healthy distraction for the creator of art, then can become a healthy distraction for the viewer, when they engage with it. The problem with TV is it leaves so little room for engagement, and the way people tend to get absorbed by it. Same with internet, if not careful.
Anyway, just some thoughts on these different paths. It also seems like that might be modes that you could play in, like a musician does. Certain times in life might call for different modes.
Hey JMG! A great post! I like very much Schopenhauer, he was one of the greatest Western thinkers, so the poorest thinkers never have forgiven him…Of course he was a mysoginist man: nobody is perfect.
Peter, that’s certainly my read on things.
Luke, I don’t recall suggesting that there’s a difference between those two.
AliceEm, you’re most welcome. That’s a difficult road you’re walking — may it turn out well for you and your friend both.
Celadon, Wagner read voraciously and stayed at the forefront of European thought; Feuerbach and Schopenhauer were just the two most important of many influences on his ideas and creative work. As for the future of Faustian culture, a culture whose core image is expansion into infinite distance isn’t likely to make old bones. Egypt had a will to permanence; Faustian culture has a will to self-immolation. Will there be cautionary stories? Oh, quite possibly, but how much of the Faustian spirit will they actually embody?
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Enjoyer, it’s almost impossible for a philosopher not to read his ideas into his sources — it all seems to follow so logically! My take on Schopenhauer, for all of that, is strongly influenced by my reading of Eliphas Lévi, Dion Fortune, and the early Taoists. I’ll consider your offer, but respectable thinkers generally shy away hard from actual practicing occultists, you know.
Tag, I certainly encourage anyone who wants to listen to the music to do so, but I won’t have a great deal to say about the musical dimension of the Ring — I simply don’t have the background. I’m mostly going to be talking about the ideas. As for Wittgenstein, so noted!
Quift, that’s an interesting point. I don’t claim to be au courant with continental philosophy these days, so I may have missed the influence.
Wer, there are certainly fake movements — the slang term in English is “astroturf,” as an artificial equivalent of something that comes from the grassroots — but there are also real ones. As for Trump, I really have no idea. I hope we don’t have to find out.
Planasthai, I take Schopenhauer’s metaphysics as a starting point, but I make a few modifications. First, it’s in no way required, or even likely, that human beings are the zenith of the Will’s capacity for reflective self-knowledge; given infinite time before us, it is certain that there will be beings far greater and wiser than we are, and we may as well call such beings by the traditional label “gods.” This being the case, religious experience — defined here as human contact with gods — is a way to stretch the boundaries of what we can know. It doesn’t erase the boundaries, especially since the results of religious experience have to be communicated to others through the lumbering mechanisms of human thought and language, but it does allow certain tentative deductions, including those that underlie spiritual practice. As for will and intellect, not at all — a newborn infant has no intellect to speak of but expresses will with great clarity; it wills to be fed, to be held, to have its diaper changed, and so on, and will let you know in no uncertain terms if its will isn’t fulfilled!
Patricia M, I don’t recall anybody talking about Schopenhauer’s digestion, but he was very fond of gourmet meals, and in a 19th-century context that probably meant he had a cast iron digestive tract.
Mark, of course. Most people are naturally eclectic; when Paul Feyerabend wrote Against Method, which challenged the idea that philosophical consistency is a good thing, he spoke for the vast majority. Philosophers have been tearing out their hair over that for millennia.
Steve, I’m very much in favor of ending up with Proclus, for what it’s worth! As for your analysis, yes, that works tolerably well within a Schopenhauerian account; rather than speaking of different wills, he’d frame the henads as grades of the Will, and in fact he does frame the Ideas in those terms, as part of his absorption of Plato into his system.
Phutatorius, you’ll notice that I didn’t ask anyone to read Schopenhauer. I think he’s readable and worth the time, but your mileage may vary; as long as you have some sense of the basic ideas, you should be able to follow along.
Justin, I’m not sure if AA was riffing off Schopenhauer or borrowing from Christian mysticism, which also tends toward a renunciation of will; it’s an interesting question. As for different modes, of course! To my mind, it’s very healthy that writers about philosophy these days very often talk about this philosopher’s or that philosopher’s account of reality, without trying to claim that one or the other is The One Right Way. Different accounts or, if you will, different maps are useful in different situations.
Chuaquin, oh, granted. We all have our bad habits and our stupidities.
Wonderful episode JMG and much to ponder! Dion Fortune’s three-fold way and the story of Orpheus (which I’ve been meditating on) has become much clearer and more meaningful!
Thank you!
Yogaandthetarot Jill C
JMG,
I’m often surprised at the lack of mention of the influence Jacob Boehme had on Schopenhauer as well as on a host of other German philosophers. Boehme, who as some have said was the first German philosopher, posited that at the root of existence was the “Ungrund”, the Godhead, which was essentially the Will, which is prior to God and the Divine Trinity. (In Boehme’s Christian terms). Within the Ungrund, which is Nothing, a Chaos, there is the eternal desire to become something – this is the fiery nature of God at the root of existence which gives way to the dynamic process of light, love, Creation.
The philosophy of Schopenhauer and of other German philosophers seem to be a de-Christianized version of Boehme. Granted, Boehme was not exactly systematic in his writings as were the philosophers who came later. His writings are not exactly elegant, and are at times impossible to comprehend, much in the same way as are some of the poems of Blake, who was also influenced by Boehme. But he does seem to have originated, in German philosophy at least, the idea of the Will as the root of consciousness and Existence itself.
“In China… later philosophy focused on social and political life, seeking to solve the problem of how human beings can live together in relative peace. In India… later philosophy focused on mysticism and the quest to live in harmony with the Divine. In Greece… later philosophy focused on ethics and explored ways for the individual to live in harmony with himself. What direction Western philosophy might take in response to the same shattering discovery of the limits of the human mind is anyone’s guess.”
I am going to guess, even though I’m not a great philosopher, that Western thought will continue to focus on Nature because that is what it has been doing so far. That is what created modern science. Also, arguably, among the three domains of Divinity, Humanity, and Nature, only Nature has not been studied in depth by other philosophies.
It is now clear that the great Western quest for complete understanding and conquest of Nature has failed. Therefore, the main question becomes: “How should we relate to Nature that we can’t fully understand or control, and live in relative harmony with it?” This will be a significant concern for future societies, as they will have to grapple with the pollution and environmental degradation left by previous generations.
With any luck, future thinkers will take a step back and adopt a more humble attitude, like that of natural philosophers and alchemists, and follow in Nature’s footsteps, attempting to imitate her. I think, you, JMG, are a forerunner of this future school of thought; you’re just ahead of the time.
https://www.alchemywebsite.com/images/AF42.jpg
Dagnabbit, Bro. JMG, – my reading, listening, and discursively meditating lists keep growing because of this here blog and commentariat, and I’ve always had a challenge with pruning. You’ve even got me listening to and watching operas. 😉
Thanks for this, JMG. On the one hand, my high-school understanding of philosophy simple does not stack up to what little we are discussing here (no surprises there). Specially important is how our modern cosmo-vision derives directly from (Hegelian) philosophy. I do think the obscurity of this fact is more or less unintended; the “don’t think, do” attitude is 100% handed down from the powers that be, but I do not think themselves are aware of how deep the rabbit hole goes.
And on a more personal note, quite the mirror you have presented us (or is it just me?). “Clueless intellectual meets life, hilarity ensues” does not begin to describe it. Yet, it is comforting to know there might be a better version of yourself on the other side of it, if only you are willing to walk the tunnel from side to side.
JMG, it makes sense. A society that always super sizes itself into Infinity and beyond, and tries to manifest that across (ahem) the whole globe, is liable to generate an impressive kickback or pendulum swing. Such a swing could well annihilate all trace of the Faustians.
JMG,
Wer makes an interesting point. Most people don’t have the time, inclination, reading comprehension skills or intellect to study the great philosophers in depth and decide which ideas to apply to their life. Many don’t think much beyond the kick-off time of the next football game, and where their next slice of pizza is coming from. Others adopt a dumbed down and consumer driven philosophy spoon fed them by such books as ” The Secret”.
But others ( in my experience these were farmers, fishermen and old school workingmen) would adopt an actual philosophy of life base on experience, church, analogies, or wisdom passed down to them by mentors or parents. Granted these philosophies may have been ultimately seeded by the great philosophers so I am not discounting their influence.
My grandfather had less than a high school education, having fled the dustbowl of Nebraska , worked picking crops in Eastern Washington and Oregon, worked building Barracks as a carpenter during WWII and ultimately becoming a small dairy farmer before retiring to spend time on my parents farm teaching me and my siblings the meaning of hard work.
His personal philosophy seemed like a kind of prairie stoicism. He advised me not to take up vices such as drinking or smoking, not because they were bad for your health or an affront to god, but because they caused a man to lose control of his own will, to become dependent on something other than his own decisions. To not worry about circumstances beyond your control and make the best of what you had . He was as happy sitting in the shade drinking lemonade as he was pitchforking manure by hand in to the manure spreader.
Many of these old-timers that I had the honor to meet and work with in that pre-internet agricultural world seemed to take a much more contemplative and philosophical approach to the world than most of the highly “conventionaly”educated people I know today, even though many of them had little education.
Elon Musk, Just had a post where he explains why he continues to work though he is worth $billions. He explains using his quest for meaning in philosophy. This starts off nicely ,but then veers off in to the ditch of interstellar travel. But partway through he drops this statement that is very relevant to todays post.
“Be careful of reading German philosophers as a teenager. It’s definitely not going to help with your depression. So reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, as an adult, it’s much more manageable. But as a kid, you’re like, “Whoa.”
I’m finding myself worked back sort of full circle to a repackaging of Kant. I’ve reached a point where I need to cut to the core ‘thing’ that has driven me for decades. I’ve just put Schop. V1&2 at my bed stand. The Art has moved me by, I guess, will and flowing synchronicities. I have been so amazed by the great intelligence with which I am so grateful to have been able to participate. I’ve come to realize that this ? is that which lived me through the jungles of ’75.
I don’t have time to meander. The Art is on the cusp of a new stage. I brought my study of the Tree of Life into The Art and it beckons me forward. I can’t imagine that I won’t go there, but now it will be about my own will. I need to pull the pieces together and become what you might call operational. It was all destiny as the story unfolded up to now. The pieces all fell into place – mind you I had to be kicked in the head along the way, and the scars are integral to the process.
“…there were three ways to deal with the tragic nature of existence. One is the way of affirmation just mentioned. The second is the way of negation, in which the will negates itself and enters into peace: in essence, the way of mysticism. These two are accessible only to the few. For the many, however, there is a third way, which is art. All the arts—music, painting, poetry, dance, sculpture, fiction, you name it—raise consciousness above will….” I think that I’m looking for a middle path here…
>The irony is that they’re probably doing a better job of supporting Trump than his most enthusiastic fans
Don’t forget the shadowy deep staters trying to kill him either. They’ve endorsed him with bullets.
13 Thank yous, once again, Arch druid, for this further dive into the history of ideas,
I am very intrigued by this idea or role that will can play, both philosophically and practically, whether that be in the occult realms or psychological growth and development. Otto Rank wrote about Will Therapy and influenced many of the psychologists that I have been influenced by, Carl Rogers and Stanislav Grof, to name a couple. Rank also coined the term Counter-Will, which has become a forgotten part of the history of psychology and psychotherapy. Understanding counter will has been most helpful in my many years of working in child and youth mental health and understanding human development. I have no idea if Rank was influenced by philosophers from the century before, certainly this history of ideas extends down through the years, centuries in ways I can only begin to imagine.
Always a pleasure to read this blog each week!
Long life and honey in the heart!
@ Tunesmyth –
Thank you very much for posting the housing-related prayer request for myself, my sister Cynthia and our elderly mother Dianne. If there is any way you can see to bring it to further prominence under non-health related matters, I would really appreciate it. Thanks!
Kevin
Kevin
Great essay and much to think about! For now, I just have a few fragments.
After your first Schopenhauer post some years ago, I read WWR and was surprised by his knowledge of English-language philosophers. Now I know it was his personal education, but generalized knowledge of English in his time!
When you summarize his writing about touch as the frustration of will, I immediately thought about caressing a human being, or an animal, which is not frustrating at all…
I think what Saved Schopenhauer in a way as I read this, was that he admitted he was a John in his younger years out of frustration – that his disposition caused him to make those mistakes. That he also knew that there were and are and will always will be people who never had to pay money to a prostitute, that when one has a moment of self destructive actions that they have the will to pick themselves up. Thats what saves him and his work from entering the dustbin. A lot to think and mull over.
You leave it as an exercise for the reader why Schopenhauer’s influence waned with WWII. My impression is that almost every philosophically inclined writer of the 1920s and 1930s glorified strong wills and independent minds, vilifying rules and laws (not least those of the Hebrew Bible). This may have been more directly influenced by Nietzsche than by S., but I think all the talk about will got tainted by Triumph of the Will .
Hi John Michael,
Salads? Are you serious? Hmm.
You can tell a lot from a photograph, and Lovecraft’s small mouth and narrow nose is also suggestive of someone who’d experience breathing difficulties. That may in some small way perhaps explain some of the err, how did you put it again, paranoia? Thought you might be personally interested, but I’ve read that there are some statistical relationships being noticed between: picky eating behaviour; soft foods; lack of jaw development; mouth breathing in preference to using the nose; and autism.
Have to laugh about Wagner in a sort of sad way, but he’d exhausted every avenue and possibility for forcing his will upon the rest of the world, until he could no longer ignore the simple truth: It was him all along. But to his credit, clearly he must have started out on that journey, and obviously he found something there.
I’ve been wondering about the land of stuff and the bear of late. Hmm. Oil and energy is clearly going from one to the other nowadays, and err, well, given such transfers now exist outside the purview of the western sphere of interests, do you think it may be possible that over in the land of stuff they now run a two tier economy? Obviously there are some problems over there, but for all we know, they could walk away from their currency for a new one. Most of their transactions are now digital. Hmm. It’d be a neat way for them to hedge their bets and play one groups interest off that of the others. Plus for all we know, the land of stuff may let the wests influence wane that way (and possibly also tank the same interests) without quite directly confronting the west. Dunno.
Oh, and I’m amazed that anything and everything will get chucked under the bus in order to dodge inflation for a little bit longer. The de minimis rule changes are fascinating, and turns out even the super wealthy have to kowtow, just like everybody else.
Sometimes there’s so much going on, it makes my head spin!
Cheers
Chris
Aren’t Schopenhauer Nietzsche Wagner etc just saying the same thing that Shakespeare laid out hundreds of years earlier (and others before him, including the whole western church idea of contrition)? There doesn’t seem to be anything new here, just a continuous rediscovery and justification of the same core Faustian myth. You don’t need to go any further than King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth to understand all the guilt, psychological drama, will to power and historical depth of Faustian man. It’s all tragic, but not tragic in a Greek way (situational and fickle) but tragic in the manner of individual wills, particulars and effects through time.
God to western man has always been Will, he is just the biggest Will. But western will itself is a phantom from other philosophical perspectives.
@ Peter Wilson #22
I’ve been meaning to read more of Fortune and have some books I haven’t started yet – where does she write of her approach to theodicy, and the way she deals with limits?
Thanks,
Drew C
PS and of course thanks for JMG for this fascinating series, I favor “The Marriage of Figaro” as the peak of Faustian culture, but am enjoying the explanation of how the Ring cycle may be more of a capstone.
Out of curiosity, what did Schopenhauer say (if anything) about the issue of time? I’ve read some blurbs by philosophers and also books by Brian Greene and some other physicists and some of it makes some sense but the problem is that the science stuff (you know, like the ‘block’ universe idea) contradicts our everyday experience of time.
What I got from this ‘block’ universe is that past and present and future all simultaneously co-exist which defies what we see moment by moment.
But some of it made some sense because by this scheme if space is the distance between objects then time is the distance between events. And an event is a change in the configuration of objects and so you locate something in time by locating it in a particular configuration of objects.
But still all this doesn’t square with our conscious experience of one moment following on the heels of another and of time having a ‘direction’ for lack of a better word.
So what of Schopenhauer? Did he have anything useful or did he just add to the mystification? Because according to some of these geniuses we’re just four dimensional insects encased in this amber of the space-time continuum. But then what of free will?
It’s such a great project to illuminate German philosophy through these operas and to illuminate the operas through German philosophy.
Not knowing German, I have a question about the libretto. Is the archaic quality of the English translation (Thou rejoicest rather than You rejoice, etc) an attempt to get across German grammar or is Wagner’s language deliberately archaic?
While thou rejoicest,
Joyless am I.
Thou hast thy hall;
By chance, my bookclub (of two) is attempting to read _Atlas Shrugged_. Both of us have read it completely in our younger days, enthralled with the novel as young men often are, and this will be my third or fourth attempt to reread it in later years (having not gotten past the first screed in those previous attempts). But we’re still in the early, more readable chapters and I am reminded once more why Francisco d’Anconia–and not John Galt–is the ideal to which I would choose to aspire:
“Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better than anyone else, and he did it without effort…What he meant by doing was doing superlatively.”
“[I]f one stopped him mid-flight, he could always name the purpose of his every random movement. Two things were impossible to him: to stand still or move aimlessly.”
Setting aside Rand’s worship of greed and deification of human reason, this portrayal of Francisco is to me the embodiment of Will and the effortless grace that is the ideal of the Renaissance Man. To strive with purpose. To carve one’s path through life. To imbue existence with meaning through the creative act. How does one reach for such meaning in a world bound by tragedy?
Jill, you’re most welcome.
Will, hmm! Interesting. Yes, that makes sense — and it reminds me that I really do have to study Boehme one of these days.
Ecosophian, I certainly hope Western philosophy takes up that question. It could accomplish quite a bit of good that way.
Monster, I see my evil plan is working. (Rubs hands together fiendishly…)
CR, I think a lot of people have had that experience of late!
Celadon, exactly. Europe in particular seems to have been seized by a passionate desire for self-annihilation.
Clay, I’ve met people not too different from that, and yes, there’s a folk contemplative tradition that gets far less attention than it deserves. As for Musk, oh, granted! Asian philosophy is better for teenagers. (At least it always worked for me.)
Cobo, good. There’s a middle path in all these dichotomies (and trichotomies!) — it just takes finding.
Other Owen, so far those have been very useful endorsements.
Hankshaw, fascinating. I haven’t read Otto Rank, and I think I need to.
Aldarion, good. It says a lot about Schopenhauer that he never thought of that example.
Novid, I suppose that’s one way to look at it.
Aldarion, yep. It was exactly that.
Chris, yep. He was terrified of salads, fish, cold weather, mushrooms, air conditioners, his own ancestry, and much, much more. Autistic? Very possibly so.
Will-ow, sure, if you overgeneralize it. That said, Schopenhauer was a passionate Shakespeare fan and read him in the original, so reflections of Shakespeare in his philosophy aren’t accidental.
Smith, Schopenhauer accepted Kant’s argument that time, like space and causality, were a priori categories of human consciousness. They’re not objectively real — they’re part of the hardwired structure through which we experience the world as representation. That doesn’t result in the amber-block theory, since that tacitly assumes that space or space-like dimensions are objectively real but time is not; Kant’s analysis (expanded by Schopenhauer in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is that space is just as subjective as time. We cannot experience the world except through the subjective structure of space, time, and causality; to us, they are more real than anything else — but they’re still part of the equipment with which we perceive the world, not part of the world we perceive.
Joel, Wagner’s libretto is in faux-archaic German — it’s in alliterative verse, for example, and he always calls a horse Ross, “steed,” rather than Pferd, the usual word for a horse — but the translation was also made at a time when most second- and third-rate poets in English thought archaic diction sounded better. Thus it’s kind of both.
David BTL, Castiglione called that sprezzatura, and considered it to be the supreme grace that a gentleman can achieve. How do you get there? Well, Castiglione might be a good start…
Anna Russell, a marvelous operatic comedienne, has summarized the Ring Cycle for the edification of the “average opera goer.”
You can listen to it here: https://youtu.be/CM33rgC2Fek?si=FCBRUqZDbkCtxGS-
(It’s from a record album, though there are also videos of live performances available if you look for them.)
@JMG re: Getting the Most out of Schopenhauer for a Student of Occultism
First, very much enjoying these posts. Secondly, besides reading closely, taking notes, and likely meditating on key bits, any advice on tackling Schopenhauer with an eye toward informing occult philosophy?
My blessings to all who welcome them,
Jeff
Tyler, if you happen to be hanging around these comments, someone over on the prayer list page has posted asking if you’ve had Isabella screened for Hirschsprung’s disease, which their child also had, and for which timely diagnosis could make a real difference. As myself also a father of a child with an ultra rare disease (which unfortunately in this day and age may not any longer be as rare as one would hope), I’ll attest that the long shots are also worth looking into.
(Apologies for being off-topic, JMG)
Speaking of unattainable dreams, Freddie de Boer is currently debating Scott Alexander through Substack about whether technological progress is speeding up or slowing down. The dream of infinite progress is getting worked over with a baseball bat: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/to-learn-to-live-in-a-mundane-universe
Drew C,
The two books you want are Fortune’s The Cosmic Doctrine, which to be fair, is extremely hard going without our hosts companion reader, “A Companion to the Cosmic Doctrine”. This was also a series of blog posts that are still online.
Fortune’s approach to evil and the cosmos takes a bit of work, it’s about training the mind to think in a different, but once you are through that the world does seem to make a lot more sense, and when bad stuff happens, you do get a sort of sanguine, ah well…
I rate my exposure to that book as the most profound teaching I’ve received in this life, it’s had huge benefits on my life, more so than any other system or philosophy, but that might be just that it clicked with me, although others had a similar response.
Re Chris #18
I have also noticed something odd about Wagner’s eyes. They seem to be looking in slightly different directions, but I cannot find any reference to confirm that he had a slight squint. He did complain of visual disturbances, but these are most likely due to the migraines he suffered from.
https://schmerzklinik.de/en/richard-wagner-39-s-migraine-problem-explained/
Hi JMG,
I was curious how compatible you thought Schopenhauer’s concept of “ideas” was with Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic resonance. My take on it had been (although I read Sheldrake second) that they were very similar, some sort of plan or blueprint that existed as a track in space but that was formed “from the ground up”, but that had arisen spontaneously and then solidified. I thought the two complimented each other anyway.
In a slight tangent, and in a different direction, the issue you’ve discussed about “how best to live in a world we cannot fully understand” – I thought William James and the pragmatists took some helpful steps to try to get beyond the basic confusion of skepticism and uncertainty, which was to say something like, “fine, you can’t be certain of anything, but how clearly can you define what it is you are trying to achieve (or trying to ask), and what approach seems to get you closest to that goal when you try it?”. I believe it was Hume they wanted to move beyond specifically, but also James realized that language can obscure discussions sometimes, because multiple things can be stated using the same words or phrases, so often you need to separate these specific meanings out through attention, and bring them to the surface of your mind so that you can compare the differences between what is being asked. If indeed a question is actually two separate questions or more, if you can lay them out next to each other and go, “oh, I mean question A, therefore the answer is…” rather than be stuck at some unanswerable block (sometimes for centuries).
To continue a thought from last time we spoke, Sheldrake and James are also writers who are very easy to read, but whose ideas have a lot of insight and utility.
@Wer, I’m very glad to see you here and glad you are safe. I’m just tagging along here too. Too busy! My brother-in-law got injured by the topic we won’t mention here, and I have to do a lot more around the house in addition to my work and volunteer projects. But at least I am safe. So far, anyway.
JMG, what do you think Western civilization’s non-taken path would have been? “How to live in harmony with” … Nature, perhaps?
If that was what the West was supposed to ask and find out, and it refused the quest, it’s no wonder that Nature’s limits are dragging it down, kicking and screaming.
JMG: “Fifth, and crucially, there were three ways to deal with the tragic nature of existence. One is the way of affirmation just mentioned. The second is the way of negation, in which the will negates itself and enters into peace: in essence, the way of mysticism.”
I do not have the scope that you draw upon, so quite possibly I have things wrong, but from my limited reading, the use of the language of annihilation has been overdone and that it is more an unfolding to ‘greater’ Will by setting the personality/ego of incarnation in a more useful place as opposed to actually destroying it. I’d have to try and dig out the references, but IIRC the ego of incarnation is a tool that makes so much ‘noise’ that it drowns out higher intuition and thinks it is something it is not. To totally destroy the ego of incarnation would mean not being here, since the personality is an intrinsic part of the vehicles (mind and body) that we use to experience the world of limitation.
Basically that the talk of destroying the ego whilst one path to try and fold into the divine is not the only way of mysticism – things not so much destroyed as made to function differently – a choice if you will.
I have been entertaining myself looking for patterns and a tentative thought is that the way of affirmation and the way of negation are sides of the same coin – the interesting stuff (for me) is what goes on around the coin’s edge.
Put simplistically – that for for some occultists, a path is to actively develop perceptions and abilities, whilst a mystic path focuses on the connection with the divine rather than specific abilities.
The visual I have of it is like taking that coin and spinning it so it forms a sphere – neither the sides or the edge of the coin is actuality, just what we have to work with.
“All the arts—music, painting, poetry, dance, sculpture, fiction, you name it—raise consciousness above will.”
Thinking how what you said about art fitted in with that metaphor of two sides of a coin and an edge; then wondered that perhaps ‘Art’ is an expression of the spinning coin as a sphere. The Beauty of Art comes out of something set in motion.
Or, another way of looking at it could be that where an occultist may fall prey to ego disharmony on development of abilities, some of the mystics appear to try and avoid that pitfall by focusing elsewhere and letting abilities manifest if that is to be – that abilities will manifest when we have ripened enough and not to induce them while we are still ‘sour’.
Gah! Words! Did that lot make any sense or am I shovelling a brain fart with a sieve?
So, will is primal, will is supreme. But will is also kind of dumb. Will is full blown retarded, if you ask me. And if it is true that not much can be known about the world, then directing will is also something that can’t be done very well either. Who designed this reality? I don’t know if I agree with those people saying let go of your will – but I understand.
What we should be asking isn’t why the world is in such bad a shape, but why it isn’t complete full blown chaos all the time. I guess in some parts of the world, it is. And in other news, a whole bunch of pagers just decided to go boom all of a sudden, for no real reason other than they wanted to….
JMG #39: I agree with your opinion. Everybody has “bad habits and stupidities”, the great Schopenhauer too. However, his misogyny always has taken aback me. Baltasar Gracian and H.D. Thoreau, by the way, are both misoginist thinkers, but Arthur Schopenhauer is the most misogynist philosopher of all I’ve read, by far. I know he had trouble with a “bad” mother but he wrote awful things about women, and he never married…Me as a sensitive man, I have a lot of friends between women, but I’ve had always the misogyny topic when I talk to them about Schopenhauer; and it’s a pity because in the other hand he’s one of the greatest thinkers. If I say thet I like that philosopher, I’m usually suspect of misoginy…(And I repeat I’m the less misogynist man at least in my town!).
——————————————————————————————————————————
Clay Dennis #45: I like the phrase:” His personal philosophy seemed like a kind of prairie stoicism.” I understand perfectly that idea. And I can extend it to my own grandparents, who were both illiterate and they both lived a war and a post-war time. However, they taught me more about practical stoicism than Philosophy books; they were strong farmers who finished living in a big town, but they never lost their personal high principles, in spite of not having read never Seneca or Marcus Aurelius books.
Hi John Michael,
For a moment there, as a pure thought experiment, I tried to put my mind into that sort of Lovecraftian space of fear and anxiety. Truly, and it’s ironic, but my mind recoiled from the thought experiment in total fright. It left me feeling very unsettled. Not a place I’d happily reside.
Hmm. The experience was useful because I then began to wonder about fear and anxiety in relation to Mr Lovercraft. Would it have been an act of his will to view the world through that lens? Dunno, we’ll never really know, but I’m considering that there may have been an element of will employed to maintain that sort of presence of mind in that space. You’ve probably read a lot about the author, whereas I know very little. I’m curious as to whether you’re aware, or may have read-in-between-the-lines, whether he’d tackled any of those fears over his life?
I’ve imagined some awful things happening over my life, and sometimes they eventuated, but mostly I tend to face fears and see what they’re trying to tell me. It’s hard to know where such thought originate from, but mostly they seem to be based on external stimuli and abstract knowledge. Dunno. It’s a complicated subject.
Cheers
Chris
“Art, literature, music, and popular culture all echoed with the impact of Schopenhauer’s thought. ”
This essay made clear that the super hero known as The Green Lantern has the power of Schopenhauer!
His magical ring is directed by the wearers Will and makes energy constructs that are Representations from the wearers mind.
(now it would be cool if the writers and artists would show that different wearers Represent the world differently. In the comics there is a corps of green lanterns made up of a bunch of different aliens, and it would be awesome if in a story the different green lanterns made their own Representations of the same thing and they were all different. Like the story of the blind men describing an elephant. The earth green lantern creates a spear like Representation, The Martian green lantern creates a Wall, etc. etc. and only after many of these partially accurate Representations are made and combined can the opponent that is frustrating the green lanterns be overcome.)
Greetings all!
Could the will not be compared to the engine that provides power and drive, while consciousness be compared to the entity holding the steering wheel and charting a course?
In that metaphor both will and consciousness are equally necessary…
I’ve been waiting for this post and I’m certainly not disappointed!
By way of synchronicity, I’ve been listening to a Russian rock song from 2020. There is a bit there that goes roughly like this:
Believe me, I know all that you could say
Don’t waste words, they will remain only words
You see images, I see only the flame
Only the flame and I’ve nothing to lose!
I’m sure you can see why I found this relevant to the post. The author of that song is known for the breadth of his philosophical and esoteric interests, so it wouldn’t even surprise me if it was somehow influenced by Schopenhauer. It could, of course, be any number of other things too, but listening to it after reading the post struck me as auspicious.
JMG,
If Will doesn’t belong to anyone, does that mean there is no personal will? That would actually make a lot of sense. We as conscious agents, are expressions of Will, but that Will doesn’t belong to us anymore than the ocean belongs to a water molecule. So we can’t control Will, but we can use imagination, awareness, and memory to “receive” it better. We can shape our memories/characters/thoughts/emotions/bodies, to know how to channel it more effectively for our purposes. And magic could be viewed as setting up a framework for the Will to flow through as well. It’s kind of like building a road to direct traffic to where you want it to go.
Jen, it’s a surprisingly good summary!
Jeff, take the time to reread Lévi before or after Schopenhauer — that’ll help.
Kfish, huzzah! I’m delighted to hear this.
Johnny, I see Schopenhauer and Sheldrake as talking about some of the same things using different sets of metaphors — Schopenhauer is borrowing his from introspection while Sheldrake is borrowing his from physics. As for James and the pragmatists, yes, exactly — they were another attempt, a more widely accepted one, to get past the vast steaming mess of Hegelian idealism and talk about the world we actually experience.
Bruno, yes, exactly. The basic idioms of Western thought, though, put that out of reach, and so some future culture is going to have to pick up the tools we made and do something more useful with them.
Earthworm, that’s certainly one very reasonable way to approach it, but it wasn’t Schopenhauer’s way. He explicitly described mysticism as the process by which the will expressed in an individual turns against itself, negates itself, and comes to rest in the peace of nonexistence. I’m not especially impressed by that approach either, but that’s what he was saying, at least in WWR.
Other Owen, nobody designed this reality, in Schopenhauer’s view. Reality is not a manufactured product. Think of the old Greek myths about how the universe was born from Chaos, and only achieved some sort of tentative order once the gods overthrew the titans and Zeus knocked enough heads together to impose peace on the whole gallimaufry — that’s Schopenhauer’s view, except without the gods. (Me, I think he was wrong there and the Greeks were right.)
Chuaquin, it’s always convenient to dismiss thinkers of the past by pointing out that they don’t live up to the currently fashionable standards of the present. It amuses me to keep in mind that 200 years from now, it’s quite possible that our current woke thinkers will be condemned with equal savagery because they failed to conform to the ethical requirements of Extaboulism, or whatever the new fashion calls itself.
Chris, Lovecraft grew and changed quite a bit over the course of his life. The nastily racist poetry that everyone woke likes to quote all came from his teen years; by the time he died he’d turned from a hardcore conservative Republican to a New Deal Democrat. His fiction was one of the ways he wrestled with his fears.
Dobbs, good heavens. I like it. It would be something to see a whole sequence of philosophical superhero comics — here’s issue #142, “Wrath of the Overman!” with a Nietzschean character, here’s Hegel as supervillain shrieking “I am the Absolute!” and so on.
Karim, sure, you could argue for that, but again, that’s not what Schopenhauer was saying.
Daniil, this inspired me to look up the reception of Schopenhauer’s work in Russia. The first translation of WWR into Russian was made by the poet Afanasy Fet sometime in the 1860s, and it influenced quite a bit of classic Russian literature; Tolstoi was a fan, among others. So it’s quite plausible that there’s a Schopenhauerian text to the song you were playing!
Luke, that’s certainly one logical implication of Schopenhauer’s view of things.
Instead of
The World as Will and Representation
what if the title was
Life as Action in Ignorance
It is only though our inter actions with the rest of the world that we actually make contact with the outside world. And though frustrating interaction with the outside world we often find that our ideas about the world are not accurate and lose some of our ignorance.
It is often a painful process to give up on illusions.
To be alive is to always act in some degree of ignorance, therefore life always has struggles and frustrations and failures but this is the only way to reduce your ignorance. Struggles, frustrations, failure and disappointment pave the road to wisdom.
“Fifth, and crucially, there were three ways to deal with the tragic nature of existence……… For the many, however, there is a third way, which is art. All the arts—music, painting, poetry, dance, sculpture, fiction, you name it—raise consciousness above will. When you’re looking at a painting, listening to music, reading a novel, or what have you, your will is set aside for the time being; you are attending to a sequence of conscious states that have nothing to do with you, your needs, your desires, or your fears. This allows the will to rest”
WOW that paragraph…… I switched the word Magic for Art and got an understanding of how Magical societies like ours work. Raising the consciousness above the will.
JMG, I’d like to ask you why, but I’m aware that the answer to that question is at least essay-long. Maybe even book-long. The hole Faustian civ dug itself into is too deep…as of now, it isn’t managing to live in harmony with basic human nature (i.e. transhumanism, gender issues, etc).
JMG,
With regards to living harmoniously in nature, I think the thought never occurred in Western thought that, “This is the only place there is to live.” Prior to the entire world being mapped out, there was always more uncharted wilderness to explore. Then we shifted our imagination to living on the planets and moons of our solar systems. Once we realized that was impossible, our fantasies shifted to living on ships sailing across the universe.
And once we realize that that dream is out of reach, either the entire enterprise will come crashing down or we will shift the vision to something stranger and equally unattainable, like living exclusively in virtual reality as the world goes to pot.
Once a new civilization pops up with the idea that, “This is our only home,” it’s likely that they will put a great deal emphasis on living harmoniously with our planet instead of acting like Hubbardian space pirates.
About Lovecraft – being sensitive to cold myself, I sympathize with his dislike for cold weather and fear of of air conditioning. I have jackets in my closet good for spring, fall, and summer indoors or on buses at at my daughter’s. And I also note, on his behalf, that IIRC, he was a great lover of the felines.
OT but a straw in the wind: On the drugstore’s news rack was one of those $17.99 8 1/2 x 11 book/magazines that offer views of a period of history or a current celebrity or what have you – devoted to Donald Trump, and treating him seriously. Or, as my wokester acquaintances would howl, “a right-wing propaganda piece straight outta MAGA HQ! GRRRR!” Didn’t buy it only because I’d already checked out and my purchases filled my tote bag completely, but on the list for the next bus run.
@dobbs #75 & @JMG #79 re: Philosophical Heroes
Not quite superheroes, but a webcomic I used to read did a gag about philosophers as D&D characters that’s pretty funny – “Dungeons & Discourse,” and its sequel, “Advanced Dungeons & Discourse”. The art went from pretty good to stunning (with “D&D” very much near the beginning of that trend, and “AD&D” about halfway along it), especially if you dig art nouveau, but the story went in some directions I wasn’t thrilled with, focusing on transhumanism and whatnot (you can see some hints of this in the linked comics), but this remains hilarious:
https://dresdencodak.com/2006/12/03/dungeons-and-discourse/
https://dresdencodak.com/2009/01/27/advanced-dungeons-and-discourse/
Cheers,
Jeff
Dobbs, that’s a book somebody ought to write. It wasn’t the one Schopenhauer wrote, though it could be written on the basis of his philosophy.
Bruno, purely because it’s too late. Westerrn civilization would have had to tackle that project before it tipped over hard into decline, and we’re well past that point now. We wasted too much time, too many resources, and too much of our cultural creativity on trying to pretend that nature doesn’t matter, and even now only a fairly small minority of people in Western countries are willing to change their lives in any way that matters — and no, wasting billions on faux-green windfarms and electric cars doesn’t even begin to count
Dennis, exactly. Our civilization from its very beginning has had a vision of endless expansion along a straight line — the Crusades were the first muddled expression of it, the age of exploration and global conquest was where the vision hit its stride, and we’ve been pursuing it with increasing obsessiveness ever since. Now we’ve reached the end of the line but most people can’t fit their heads around that — fantasies of space travel are the last refuge of the fantasy. If it ever really sinks in that here we are, and we have to live with the mess we’ve made, I expect a collective nervous breakdown on a Brobdingnagian scale.
Patricia M, hmm! Definitely a straw in the wind.
Jeff, those are great. Thank you!
http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2024/09/an-historical-masterpiece.html
“The Framer’s Coup, by one Michael Klarman. (More on him much later.) It took a couple of weeks to get the book, published in 2016 by the Oxford University Press, from the local library system. It includes 631 pages of text and 181 pages of endnotes. It is probably the single best work of American history published in the 21st century, and its appearance received almost no notice in the national press.'”
My note: from the description, I highly recommend it.
In the vein of “here we are, and we have to live with the mess we’ve made” I’ll flirt with the ban on AI here to report;
“The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project no longer has any utility
….
“Generative AI has polluted the data,” she wrote. “I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans.” She said that open web scraping was an important part of the project’s data sources and “now the web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies.” While there has always been spam on the internet and in the datasets that Wordfreq used, “it was manageable and often identifiable. Large language models generate text that masquerades as real language with intention behind it, even though there is none, and their output crops up everywhere,” she wrote.”
But the true believers continue on,
“[Microsoft] on Friday signed a major deal with nuclear plant owner Constellation Energy to restart its closed Three Mile Island plant by 2028 to power its data centers. The Constellation plant, infamous for melting down in 1979, closed in 2019 after failing to garner enough demand for its energy amid competition with cheaper alternatives like natural gas, and solar and wind power. Constellation said it plans to spend $1.6 billion to revive its reactor, pending regulatory approval. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Microsoft agreed to purchase all of the power from the reactor over the next 20 years, a Constellation spokesperson told TechCrunch. Once restored, the reactor promises a capacity of 835 megawatts.”
Natural gas isn’t Green enough, and under no circumstances can the servers be shut down just because the sun set and the batteries are discharged because it was too cloudy to charge them.
It occurred to me that AI wrecking the language might be the cause of the Fermi Paradox. Or it could be a repeat of the Tower of Babel.
I think that guys like Brian Greene would agree with Kant and Schopenhauer about the subjective nature of time. I think that Greene comes at it from the perspective of Einsteinian relativity.
I think that in this view the present moment has no special status as compared to past or future. Per Greene (and I’m paraphrasing) someone living a billion light years away from us would have as his present moment a slice of the universe that contains a piece of Earth history depending on which direction this being is travelling. If he travels towards us, given the distance he is from us, his present-moment-slice-of-the-universe might contain the Earth in the year 1880 and if he travels away from us it might contain Earth in the year 2160.
Hence the subjective nature of time. But this conception is also necessarily a product of human neurological machinery and sensory apparatus. Hence another layer of subjectivity.
Still, there must also be a layer of objective fact in this or GPS would never work as relativistic effects from us being down a gravity well and satellites being above us in orbit have to be taken into account. You, know, time dilation and all that.
But as you say, and as other theoretical physicists have said, time may be illusory. Other guys say the same about space.
So, and this is what I wonder about, given that we supposedly exist in the space-time continuum as fully and completely in the past and the future as we do in the present, let’s say as 20 year olds and 80 year olds respectively, why are we conscious of only one moment of time in sequence as opposed to the whole panoply of our present and past and future existence simultaneously? We are conscious of our lives in slices a second thick. Has anyone ever looked into this problem?
So, as you finish a book, there are people in your future in the space-time continuum reading that book as real and as fully alive and conscious as you are the day you send it to the publisher. Odd, no?
This is where this damned subjectivity comes in, it confuses me, my lyin’ eyes and malfunctioning brain are in conflict with what physics tells us about the nature of time and space. And Einstein’s theories have withstood more than a century of testing and observation.
Interesting summary of the life and philosophy of Schopenhauer, JMG: he was certainly a lot more perceptive than most of the lost souls who populated the 19th century European intellectual circles. Interesting, too, that Leo Tolstoi was impressed by Schopenhauer; I can see how it is reflected in Tolstoi’s great works of fiction – as opposed to the short stories that he wrote after he renounced his art and found God (and which I vastly prefer to his novels). Also, being a mystic, I firmly believe that Schopenhauer really missed the boat when describing the mystic. In my experience, a mystic does not get annihilated like a moth in the flame, but rather loses identification with the little ‘self’ by identifying with the cosmic ‘Self’ in the same way that a river, by merging with the ocean becomes one with the ocean. I think that I’ll stick with my Upanishads… and Celtic legends… and First Nation teachings. Even though one of my great-grandfathers was German, I have always found German culture, art and thought to be utterly alien – interesting, but alien.
@Smith #88, Boris Mouravieff gets into time and consciousness in Gnosis. So there’s one, anyway. Maurice Nichol goes further in Living Time.
A penny dropped. Poor but housed people are so hated and despised, perhaps even more than the homeless, because they usually say “I live here” and mean by that this is only home I have. Faustians don’t like that thought even in microcosm form. Hence the class disdain of those who “fail to move onward and upward” and instead are beaches somewhere they have to accept. Yet great art consoles and brings peace with what is. Hence, they can’t really hold up great Faustian art either, despite the affinity. Rootless, affluent, and nomadic this class is consistent.
Wer here
Well something rather interesting and concerning about behavior of people. JMG you know about Wagner operas and Ancient Greek tragedies far more than I would ever know and I am not come here for lenghtly dispute, in operas you often have a prophecy or something telling the main hero that disaster is at hand etc. (Wotan constantly being bombarded about the fact that the ring is cursed and trying to pursue it will lead inevitably to doom and disaster but heck let’s do it anyway) and you cannot overstate that our current leader’s are even more brazen and stupiedier.
Polish goverment announcing it will send emergency generators to Ukraine while likely the worst flood in the south of my nation’s history is taking place and damages already surpassed damages in 1997. And people are angry about inaction. I remember that in previous comments that people stated that repeated attacks on Trump are unlikely because of the disastrous potential for civil war in the US they can trigger. Yet a surprising amount of “crazy one wolf people” are bypassing all security and getting a good line of shoot at him. (Not a betting guy but at this rate a good chance exists that he might not make it to the election). In operas at least there is and ghost of mother earth wailing a warning about that consequences of one’s stupid actions but here?
And let’s not talk about “auntie Ursule” ranting about ” missile strikes deep in to Russia” is she stupid or brazen or desperate or something??? It is sad to watch this nonsense happening in front of everybody here
Just a little went because a lot of desperate people arrived in Ujście from the south and the things they said about what hapended there like a dammed horror movie and the authoreties were caught doing nothing in particural
Polish president realizing that the south of the country is flooded and destroyed a week after the fact….
JMG, I see. If the West had, it would’ve set into that calm stasis that characterizes great civilizations on their later days… it would still fall eventually, but in a timeframe of many centuries, and it wouldn’t fall as hard as it’s poised to now…
“TO DRINK OF THE BLOOD IS TO MASTER THE WORLD
BUT THE FATE OF THE EARTH AND ITS BLOOD ARE ONE”
Faustian, indeed.
Thanks JMG,
It’s been a little while, but one thing I don’t believe Schopenhauer quite got to (or at least not in the part of WWR I read (my philosophy group asked to tap out after the section on ideas, mostly because his relentless pessimism was beginning to get to the rest)), but which his thinking is very compatible with, is that an individual is both will and a collection of parts that are also will. Cells are will, organs are will (etc), and so the individual will can also be understood as a collection of smaller wills that it is emerging from. Similarly groups of individuals are will, countries, states, etc.
Alfred North Whitehead, who I don’t believe read Schopenhauer (as he was quite up front about his sources) arrives at something like this in his “Process and Reality” book. It’s not exactly a “walk in the park”, as what he’s trying to do is create a new ground floor for science in a way that is explicit and exact, but to me, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy (with his philosophy of history he discusses and demonstrates in “War & Peace”, Whitehead and Sheldrake (among others, including Dion Fortune now and of course yourself!), are all philosophers who’ve helped me to think about what’s going on in this reality that appears to me as one thing, but is really something quite different.
As for James I imagine part of his popularity is he’s so practical he’d appeal greatly to industry, A kind of “let’s cut the malarkey and get down to business” optimism which probably helped arrive us where we are today. I found him useful though, because I often have a way of thinking about things that involves entertaining parallel claims about any particular topic. I thought that was just called “thinking” and was what everybody does, but I’ve gotten into enough trouble, particularly these days, where my interest in the “wrong” claims is judged very harshly, even if I am only exploring a vague possibility in my mind, that I’ve realized it’s not universal. Anyway, I found James’ approach to be quite compatible with that, and that it suggests it just makes sense.
I’ll be curious to see the other thinkers (if you get here in this series) who take advances beyond the uncertainty that our limitations guarantee.
Thanks again,
Johnny
Hi John Michael,
Hmm. Tell you what. If the wokesters decided to shoot people who said stupid stuff when they were young and dumb, well they’d probably be coming for me as well. 🙂 I’ve said some remarkably stupid things over my life, it being notably difficult to be at the top of your game every waking moment. For a group allegedly pursuing tolerance, the wokesters seem very intolerant.
Everyone loves a redemption tale, and if Mr Lovecraft used his skills as an author to confront the darker and problematic sides of his personality, that’s awesome. In many ways the methodology has a similar process to that of journaling. I can’t imagine that he ever got around to the ‘Love Cthulu’ stage, although I’ve long suspected that his portrayal of said behemoth was something of a foil.
Happy equinox too! 🙂
Looks like we’re getting some continent wide unseasonable rain originating from the Indian Ocean. Rain to soak every Australian state next week. Long ago, one third of the continent was rainforest. The forecast rain for this corner of the continent is not unusual, but elsewhere the rain will be. It’s already hitting the western part of the country.
Are you feeling the chill of the fall weather yet?
Cheers
Chris
>It’s kind of like building a road to direct traffic to where you want it to go.
What if the drivers on the road you’re building, are all perpetually stoned and drunk and just did a few toots of coke? And forgot their glasses at home?
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=L3VkPwDmdwY
>generative AI spam has poisoned the internet
Cynically, those “bullsh*** fountains” are beginning to be seen as such and they need an excuse to explain why they are indeed, “bullsh*** fountains”. Oh, it’s not that they give out bullsh*** (which they always did), it’s that bad internet and its bad data! Bad Internet, no TikTok for you! I do find it amusing that they think they can make it up on volume though. Classic .com bubble thinking there.
>born from Chaos, and only achieved some sort of tentative order
So the order we see around us may just be a temporary and passing phenomenon? That Chaos is the true nature of things? Is that what you’re saying?
Smith
#88 September 20, 2024 at 8:44 pm
Speaking as someone more mystical than magical (though, oddly, I am both) my comment on the “nature” of time is that I believe any concept we come up with is necessarily off base, wrong, leading in a not useful direction, etc. I base this on certain experiences of time I have had in meditation, and reported experiences discussed in Govinda’s “Way of the White Clouds.” Essentially, time is a kind of vastness that, when encountered as an entity, renders discussions of it moot. Just like deistic encounters with the divine. In my experience, “now” encompasses the whole shebang (in certain meditative states). There are reports of Buddhist mystics entering meditative states that enable them to persist in that state for decades. My guess is that for them, time stops happening subjectively. Our state of not-knowing is much more all-encompassing, I believe, than we can possibly imagine. Scientific entries into the philosophical realm on the question of time? Amusing. Gotta read the “Tao Te Ching” and take it seriously to get a handle on such issues, I believe. Thanks for raising the topic and giving me a chance to natter on!
I’ve now read Wagner’s original outline for the one opera he had planned, before reading Schopenhauer, and the end is really quite insufferably smug. Also, Siegfried is this weird Jesus-not Jesus figure, exactly like you said about Feuerbach: eating your cake and having it, too. A grandson of a god, a war hero who does whatever he wants and thereby accomplishes the salvation of the world. This kind of thinking does lead to the “German Christians” of the 1930s.
I look forward to exploring how Wagner’s thinking changed in later years.
As part of this, I have started reading the Rheingold libretto, which is of course also still a bit smug – the wife (Fricka) whose evil plan is to force her husband to stay home instead of philandering around! I have tried interpreting the story as a political allegory – the Nibelungs are the hard-toiling workers (and even capitalists?), the giants are the traditional aristocracy, the gods some kind of newer elite – the Bildungsbürgertum ? Again, looking forward to your essay in two weeks!
@joel jones, I find the language of the original libretto quite unusual, not exactly archaic in the sense of dignified poetry, but with many words that have died out in normal written German and only survived in dialects. As a German, I had to look up words like “glau” in the Grimms’ dictionary. While many people consider Wagner a great composer, and the story allows the kind of deep explorations JMG is doing here, I don’t think Wagner can be considered a great poet. He used the alliterative verse he found in the Edda, but it seems to me he didn’t get into the Edda rhythm, and he certainly didn’t try to employ the Edda kennings (similes). I don’t think his verse sounds particularly good when read aloud (instead of being sung).
“No worse than us. He’s all action and no theory. We’re all theory and no action.”
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=Dj_b3QOEFYU
@Luke Z, Mark Dixon: I am not Schopenhauer nor JMG, but my understanding of Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s affirmation is that it is quite different from typical “life-affirming”, positive thinking. It’s not a question of choosing to look at the “bright side of things” or “hoping for the best”, but of affirming that everything whatever that happens is the right thing to have happened, including extremely cruel acts of nature and animal behavior.
Robinson Jeffers’ poems seem to be near to that kind of affirmation, as when he writes about birds of prey.
Patricia M, thanks for this.
Siliconguy, too funny. That’s a microcosm of what’s happening to the internet as a whole: the ease with which noise can be generated, and the difficulty of filtering it out, is causing the signal-to-noise ratio to collapse and thus negating many of the advantages of having the internet in the first place.
Smith, one of my oddities as a writer is that I sometimes have a sense of the whole trajectory of one of my books from rough idea to manuscript to publication to the various experiences of readers to the point, not necessarily all that far in the future, when the last copy reverts to wood pulp. More generally, I notice that the width of the window of time we experience as “now” varies from person to person, and the wider it is, by and large, the more conscious the person also is of past and future. I’m developing a theory on that basis relating to spiritual development; more on this some other time.
Ron, oh, no question, Schopenhauer’s an acquired taste for many people and a never-to-be-acquired taste for many more. I find him congenial, despite the fact that I disagree heartily with his pessimism; his metaphysics make good sense to me. As for his take on mysticism, why, that’s been one of the big quarrels among mystics since they first started writing about their experiences: does the soul annihilate itself, or does it identify with a cosmic Self, or does it remain itself but in the most intimate possible relationship with the cosmic Self, or what? I’ve come to think that all these and more are among the options, and each soul seeks its own bliss in its own way.
Celadon, hmm! That makes a great deal of sense.
Wer, oh, we’ve had plenty of Cassandras and Erdas predicting imminent catastrophe for a good long while now. In the classic manner, the people in power won’t listen, and so the world stumbles forward toward disaster. I tend to take von der Lügen’s ranting, and its equivalent elsewhere in Europe, as a sign that things are getting desperate in Europe. It really does look as though the EU leadership gambled everything on using Ukraine to drive the collapse of Russia and its breakup into weak successor states that then could be absorbed by the EU, giving its elite all those natural resources and other forms of wealth to plunder. Now that their bluff has been called, and the neocolonial arrangements in Africa and elsewhere that propped up western European prosperity are imploding, they may not be able to withstand the populist blowback. I’m sorry to hear about the south of your country — what a ghastly situation.
Bruno, exactly. And most Westerners wouldn’t have it any other way. “Stasis? We can’t have stasis! We have to keep moving!” Robinson Jeffers put it well:
“You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.”
Johnny, I won’t be getting to other philosophers in this sequence — I may make room for Nietzsche later on, but that’s because he was a good friend of Wagner for a while — but I’ll consider it for a future sequence. Whitehead has always frustrated the bejesus out of me — I’m quite sure there are good ideas in there, but dear gods, the marching legions of neologisms and the labored prose! I may give Process and Reality another try one of these days.
Chris, I don’t think it’s accidental that everyone remembers, and loves, Lovecraft’s monsters and nobody but extreme fans remembers the names of any of his protagonists! As for weather, yes, just over the last couple of days the temperature has lurched down 20°F or so; it’s currently 58°F and raining, where it was 78 and sunny at the beginning of the week.
Aldarion, that’s pretty much the sort of political and class meaning Wagner had in mind at first. We’ll get to it in a couple of weeks. That early outline really is tacky, isn’t it?
Speaking of refusing to face resource limits. In 2018 I attended a seminar that spoke of One Planet living. A list of countries and their respective planet use per capita was part the PowerPoint. France was 3, the USA 5. India was a little over 1. Even with best practices and equitable distribution of resource use it showed radical uncomfortable change would have to happen to achieve One Planet Living.
What we American take as a normal lifestyle is over the top. In the late 50’s Nikita Khrushchev the leader of the Soviet Union visited the USA. He taken to view the glories of the Golden Gate Bridge, then a relatively new structure. It was during morning commute time so a steady flow of cars was pouring over the bridge. He watched for a bit of time and then exclaimed, “There is only one person in each car!” A high school teacher of mine was a Korean War vet, he said he had become friends with a Korean, when he told the Korean he had a car waiting for him in a garage back home the Korean said he was lying for there was no way a young low level soldier would have a car of his own.
Speaking of elitist denial I sent an email requesting information to https://www.bioregional.com/one-planet-living an organization based in Britain. I asked them if they had worked out the specific details on what one planet living would look like on the self contained island of Britain – energy use and production, housing, diet, lifestyle, transportation, industry, manufacturing, agriculture and so on. They replied they didn’t have that information. Which to my mind would be the starting point to set up goals.
@Peter #66
Thanks for the information and thanks again to our host and this community for a great discussion.
Drew C
Thanks JMG!
No arguments here about Whitehead’s terminologies and neologisms! I believe he felt them necessary because he was trying to stitch together so many divergent philosophies into one coherent whole and didn’t want confusion, but his method creates maximum confusion up front. All I can say in that regard is that he doesn’t continuously do this throughout the book, but the trade off is he does it all upfront and you are left with a mountain of it to slog through just on faith that it’s going to be worth all the effort. Quite an approach! I believe the book was actually the transcript of a series of lectures, if I’m not mistaken, which is just mind blowing.
We started off with a shorter lecture on “events” that I’ll have to dig up for you if I can place it. His concept of events is one of his particularly strange notions. An event is his way of drawing a circle around any particular part of reality to discuss it. What I found so unusual and compelling is that events seen this way can exist across time. So the event of this cycle of Wagner operas can include this series of essays you are publishing here, which feels quite correct in how we engage with ideas and bits of nature.
Additionally he sees so much as a really existing part of reality that typically would get discarded as “subjective”, because for him subjective experience in all is disagreement is what is acted on, so all of it is real. If the West was certain that Russia would collapse if pressed, and that turned out to be factually false, that false belief is still part of the event because it drove so much effort.
All said, he makes you work for it, and he’s so difficult I’ve never been too certain he’d have agreed that I understood him at all. At any rate I found his ideas played well with Schopenhauer, and created a lot of strange new possibilities as a result. I’m not super familiar with systems theory beyond the basics, though, so it’s possible that everything he’s getting at is better handled that way.
Nietzsche I’m never quite certain what to make of. I do read him here and there, but feel like his style makes me put my guard up – because he’s funny and charming, two qualities I am weary of in philosophers. I know you rate him highly though, which certainly counts for a lot.
Anyway, thanks again!
Johnny
@JMG – wonderful essay. I really enjoy it when you shine a light on the thinkers behind the art/culture/politics. Looking at the comments, you may have already answered this; you think it’s too late for Western philosophy to really grapple with the conclusions of the Kant and Schopenhauer, and produce some sort of philosophical ethos? And that’s because we spent all of the last century and half trying to be masters of the universe?
One of the later manifestations of Schopenhauer’s approach can be found in Freud, especially later on, with his development of the idea of the “death instinct” (as opposed to the pleasure principle: sometimes called Thanatos and Eros). To over-simplify, Eros is a blind urge that in its achievements and frustrations comes to map out a world; Thanatos is not only, when outward-directed, rage against limitations and frustrations, but also, when directed inward, an urge toward cessation, dissolution, and peace.
(I am not in any way saying that Freud “stole” these ideas: I suppose that Schopenhauer was so well known in Freud’s cultural world that everyone would have recognized the similarities. Until very recently, no-one who said “To be or not to be, that is the question”, would have been driven to footnote the author, play, edition, editor, and so on of the source. )
Then there is Swinburne:
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Or Dion Fortune, who depicts an alternation between Eros and Thanatos —
“Herein do we bathe in sleep, sinking back into the primordial deep, returning to forgotten things before time was: and the soul is renewed, touching the Great Mother. Whoso cannot return to the primordial, hath no roots in life, but withereth as the grass. These are the living dead, they who are orphaned of the Great Mother.”
Dear JMG and community;
It seems to me that the West just cannot accept something that they can’t control, or that isn’t moving in the direction they want it to.
The “La La La; I can’t hear you “ response is now the response of almost everyone to everything. How does the raving of the Trans humanists makes any sense?
Although it would be interesting if AI came up with: No, you are cooked. Petroleum will run out, “renewables “ won’t replace it (beyond a 17th century level of civilization). The mental breakdown would be amazing.
Now I’m going off to write my masterpiece: Salad over Innsmouth!
Cugel
Clarke, re time, you bet, we humans have such an extraordinarily difficult time grappling with ‘time’ that it stymies the best of us.
Anyhow this ‘vastness’ idea sounds a bit like what JMG referred to as a space-like dimension. Or what I see it as the distance between events.
I think our cerebral wiring is inadequate to the task but in any event maybe there’s different approaches to understanding (or misunderstanding). Physicists and mathematicians mathematize everything. Einstein joked that after the mathematicians put their finishing touches on relativity he no longer understood it. It has the ring of truth, that is, he lost his intuitive grasp once they reduced his ideas to equations.
But maybe your meditative experience gave you the essence of what ‘time’ is without the mathematical formulations. IOW the great theoreticians have the equations and a predictive theory without really understanding what the equations describe.
Celadon, thanks for Mouravieff and Nichol. I’ll have a look at them.
BeardTree, exactly. It’s all fantasy football by people who go out of their way not to think through the actual requirements of sustainability.
Johnny, the Whiteheadian concept of event makes a great deal of sense. Once you decide to approach reality as process, as Whitehead did, you’re by definition using time as your primary framing concept and so seeing phenomena as events rather than things follows logically. The reality of subjective experience follows from the same logic — an inaccurate belief is still a belief, for example; it exists as a belief, and it inspires and directs action. As for Nietzsche, as it happens I’m rereading Beyond Good and Evil right now, and it’s confirmed my sense that Nietzsche took the Cartesian project to its logical extreme, the point at which it refuted itself (and most of post-Renaissance Western philosophy into the bargain). When Descartes set out to doubt everything, it never occurred to him that anybody would doubt whether there’s a point to doubting everything, and ask for reasons why one should ask for reasons. Nietzsche did that; he did it brilliantly; he leveled the whole enterprise to the ground and sowed salt in the ruins; and despite his occasional flailings, he offered nothing to put in the place of what he destroyed. His work is the tombstone of classic Western philosophy.
Ben, I think it’s quite possible for the ideas of Kant, Schopenhauer, and later thinkers influenced by them to be taken up by post-Faustian cultures and developed in marvelous ways. Our culture, though, has shot its bolt, and precisely in the way you’ve described: it set out to master the world instead of mastering itself.
LeGrand, true enough. I’d even go back further in Freud — the Id, in his view, is very nearly Schopenhauer’s Will, and its representations in dreams are central to the Freudian process.
Cugel, I suggested that years ago in a blog post — I pointed out that a very large share of all the laws of nature are variation on the words “you can’t do that,” and suggested that it was entirely possible that a superintelligent, conscious computer might spend a few years going working out all the laws of nature and say, “Sorry, but these things you want me to do — the faster-than-light starships, the limitless fusion power, the robot bodies into which you can upload your minds and live forever, and the rest of it — they’re not physically possible. You’ll just have to get along without them. I’m printing out the proofs right now.” It was a source of some amusement to me that my technofetishist critics, who’d been lambasting me six ways from Sunday every week — this was during the heyday of the Archdruid Report — shut up. They didn’t mention that argument at all.
All this talk of philosophers reminded me to look into Dilthey, a name which has come up a number of times in my reading. He looks interesting, as according to Wikipedia: “He argues that ‘scientific explanation of nature’ … must be completed with a theory of how the world is given to human beings through symbolically mediated practices” and for him “history is not described in terms of an object of the past, but ‘a series of world views'” (which sounds vaguely similar to what has been said above about Whitehead’s ideas).
As anyone here read any of Dilthey’s works?
Hi John Michael,
So true, who remembers the special guest death protagonist whatshisnameagain, and yet Cthulu remains.
Hey, err, you know your own business, but about a week ago I began re-reading that Mr Galbraith book we spoke of a while ago. Hmm. Well, what a fascinating re-read, and change the players and numbers, and we’re back there in the late stages all over again. Oh my! Every time I re-read the book, some new bit of information jumps into the consciousness, and thought I should just mention that err, not long before things took a dark turn, the pessimists and naysayers were vilified in public. My gut feeling tells me that emotions will be running even higher this time around. Hmm. As I wrote above, you know your business, but I made a decision to keep as they say ‘mum’ on this subject for say I dunno, maybe the next six months. Could be wrong, but history is a decent guide.
Cheers (maybe…)
Chris
JMG – Considering “time”, it has lately occurred to me that the senses of history, presence, and possibility are distinct components of all of our relationships (interpersonal and otherwise). “A kiss is still a kiss, as time goes by…” but a kiss between young people is colored by expectations, while a kiss between old folks (like me) is enriched by the memories of tens of thousands of prior kisses, and awareness of the dwindlingly finite number of kisses to come. It’s never merely the present moment.
Or, maybe for some people, it is. I think we see this more clearly in the political/economic sphere. Old products are abandoned for new ones just because today’s price is lower, never mind the domestic manufacturer who’s forced to look overseas for production or leave the market entirely, and the impact on neighbors put out of work by doing so. Elderly political candidates are propped up as long as possible without regard for their ability to serve out a term with competence, just because they have so much history. Does anyone look past the next quarterly financial report, or the next election?
JMG writes: ” I notice that the width of the window of time we experience as “now” varies from person to person, and the wider it is, by and large, the more conscious the person also is of past and future. I’m developing a theory on that basis relating to spiritual development; more on this some other time.”
If I remember correctly, there’s something along those lines in the last section of Gravity’s Rainbow, as both Slothrop and the narrative begin to disintegrate.
Happy Equinox to all!
Beardtree @ 102, have you considered the possibility that the org. you contacted might have “done the math”, so to speak, and have decided not to publish the results? This could be for different reasons, fear of losing public support for being “too pessimistic”, request by donors, or infiltration of the org.’s leadership. IDK about Britain, but here in the USA such infiltration is so common that effective non-profits have learned to expect it.
Cugel @ 107, there is a lot more to “the West” than the so-called Best and Brightest. Surely you cannot have failed to notice how elite opinion continues to diverge from Westerner on the street experience and beliefs. Nothing personal, but any foreign commentator about the USA, at least, who confines his or her research to fancy conferences and country club barbecues is talking through their hat.
Lathethechuck @ 112, old products which work as designed are often abandoned for new crap because someone in the corporate office is looking for a way to make a name for him or herself. So-called cost cutting may be the excuse but what this practice is about is egos, careers, and the production of fancy brochures to fool investors.
“Our own will is the one thing we encounter that isn’t just a representation”. I feel this statement deserves serious meditation. Thanks for making philosophy understandable and relevant.
Reminder: There will be an Ecosophian Convention in Glastonbury, UK on 7 & 8 June 2025 with JMG attending. I will provide more details closer to the time if you register your interest by emailing ecosophianconvention at gmail dot com. Over half the tickets are spoken for.
“It seems to me that the West just cannot accept something that they can’t control, or that isn’t moving in the direction they want it to.”
I’ve been wondering how much of that problem is due to urbanization. When you live in a totally artificial environment where things just appear on store shelves it’s easy to ignore all the preceding steps that put them there. The current administration’s demand for an all electric economy combined with an absolute refusal to permit new copper mines is one example.
Adding to the problem is the decline of manufacturing. Do paper shufflers and bit flippers really understand what it takes to build something? How many McMansions come with a wood shop? How many garages have a 30 amp 240 Volt outlet for the welder?
I canned applesauce yesterday, how many people still do that? Do they even have room to store the results or the equipment?
Everything should just appear by Harry Potter magic or Star Trek replicators seems to be an issue.
Then there is the math problem. The average load for a house is 1500 watts. Fine, but when the electric water heater turns on it’s 4500 watts until it turns off. The oven is 5000 watts. The small surface elements are 1250 W, the large ones are 2100 watts. The heat pump is at least 2000 W, and it’s highly likely that all of these will be on at once during the winter, and that is the load you have to design for, not the average. But no one wants to hear that.
Speaking of not listening, one of the morning’s headlines is “‘Hubris and greed’: Takeaways from the first week of US Coast Guard inquiry into the Titan submersible disaster”
May Stockton Rush’s next incarnation do better.
Justin Patrick Moore #114: Thank you! Happy Equinox for you too!
KAN, I haven’t, for whatever that’s worth. Interesting.
Chris, why, yes, since autumn — the traditional season for stock market crashes — has just arrived, I was planning on reading Galbraith’s The Great Crash 1929 yet again. I haven’t been watching any of the markets very closely, but it’s hard to think of an asset class that isn’t inflated to absurd notional values, so the chance that one or more (or, just possibly, all) of them may decide that it’s a great season for a thrilling toboggan ride down the icy slopes of Mount Recession seems tolerably high. Whee!
Lathechuck, exactly. My take is that the extent to which each kiss, let’s say, embodies time past and time future varies considerably from person to person and is a remarkably subtle measure of a certain maturation of consciousness. It has occurred to me, in fact, that there may be some connection between the fact that human beings perceive three dimensions spatially and one temporally and the occult teaching that human souls perceive three planes fully and one only partially, and this latter to a variable degree from person to person…
Phutatorius, hmm! I’ll consider reading that.
Justin, and likewise. It’s probably better to say “happy equinox” than “happy fall,” as people might wonder whether the latter references the season or the historical process… 😉
Bridge, you’re welcome. Glad to hear the Glastonbury event is coming along!
Siliconguy, that’s a very important point, for a cascade of reasons. Living in a setting designed and built by human beings is basically a feedback loop in which most of what you encounter reinforced whatever habits of thought your culture favors, where living in nature means you get corrective feedback. Meanwhile the division of labor that urban centers make possible guarantees that most people have no experience of whole systems and no exposure to the real sources of goods and services. So, yes, the more urban a society is the more clueless it becomes about the basis of its own survival. Forster’s story “The Machine Stops” comes to mind here.
JMG,
Your insight into the spectrum of the experience of time in the now has sparked a memory from my practice journal. Awhile ago, I had the insight that intelligible reality (or mental plane reality if you prefer) is at a right angle to empirical reality (which could also be stated as the dimension of time). Our experience could be mapped as the hypotenuse of a right triangle, with the top of the triangle being the mental plane, and the bottom being the plane of empirical reality. When our consciousness rests closer to the mental plane, we can look from “above” (on the straight edge of the Right Triangle) and perceive more of the dimension of time. When we reside lower on the straight edge of the Right Triangle, we can perceive less. So in other words, the straight edge of the Right Triangle maps out meaning/being and the horizontal edge maps out time.experience. This insight was rather profound when I had it, but I’ve habituated to it since then. It’s one of my best fruits of studying Sacred Geometry. Hopefully I have explained this well enough.
JMG (109)
— Yes, very much so — that the id is highly analogous to Schopenhauer’s will. Somewhere Freud remarks something to the effect that he was originally interested in philosophy, but it didn’t offer much in the way of engagement with actualities. Despite the adoption of psychoanalysis as a bohemian and even utopian device, Freud himself was generally pretty pessimistic, thinking that the best one could hope for was a conscious compromise. (“Turning neurosis into ordinary unhappiness.”)
You probably know that Freud himself didn’t use the terms “id” and “ego”, which were plugged into the English translations in place of “the It” and “the I” by one of his English translators — Ernest Jones, if I remember correctly.
Have you run into Georg Groddeck? His Book of the It is a classic of the wilder and woollier side of psychoanalysis.
Hey JMG and siliconguy
On the subject of urbanisation causing positive feedback, I recently read an amazing book called “Scale: The universals laws of life and death in organisms, cities and companies.” by Geoffrey West which actually investigated this in a mathematical way. Essentially, he and his team proved that due to the way increased urbanisation increases the frequency of interaction between people many of the socioeconomic factors of life in cities, such as business formation, scale superlinearly. It is a bit hard for me to summarise well, but I was going to mention it next open post as I think it has a lot of relevance to Greer’s Catabolic collapse theory.
Hi Siliconguy,
Exactly! People are clueless when it comes to energy literacy, and that’s so true about the outlets.
Down under, I believe the average house can pull about 60A at 240V in total, but that depends upon what your neighbours are doing, and what their neighbours are doing etc… And running substations and transformers in the grid at full speed ahead mode is not good for the components longevity. Most household power circuits down here are fused for 16A, light circuits are about half that, and trying to draw more than that through any single normal circuit could produce the magic smoke at pretty much any point due to inadequate wire sizing, which nobody really wants to encounter.
A friend who is an electrical engineer was telling me that car chargers which plug into a normal 240V house wall sockets, are generally limited to 6A at 240V due to concerns about the state of the average households internal wiring, and try charging a 50kWh car battery at that rate! It’s gonna take a while…
We’ve been using off grid solar for about 14 years now, and the system is pretty robust (and being meticulously monitored and maintained, it’s not a set and forget arrangement) and 5KVA mains output is about the best you can achieve continuously, whilst the sun high in the sky on a clear day around the mid morning to mid afternoon. For your interest, the grid in this area is delivered by way of a Single Wire Earth Return system (which as a system is considered a bit too dodgy for your country – presumably the US, so you lot get better systems), and from what I understand, about 5KVA is about the best continuous supply households on such lines can expect. Except they get that supply at night.
The electrify everything belief is akin to the attempt to find a unicorn. Totally nuts.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
It’s a great re-read, and I’m sure you’ll also enjoy re-reading the book. The author has such a lovely grasp of the English language, and he uses turns of phrases that I could only ever dream of coming up with. Ah, education these days, when you delve into a book written not all that long ago, it can be confronting to see just how far we’ve fallen in these enlightened days. Oh well. What’s fascinating about the book is that for such a dark topic, it’s both funny and witty. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts on the re-read.
As to your other observation, why yes. Man, I see and hear things which make me think to myself: That’s not right. But err, on a serious note, if history is any guide to the stages, pessimism may soon be treated as antithetical. I’m not mucking around either. And I can use that word, because ‘they’, won’t know what it means! 😉
Cheers
Chris
Legrand Cinq-Mars,
“id” and “ego” are Latin for “it” and “I”.
Anonymous (#125) —
Well spotted!
Of course, the translator could simply have used “It” and “I”, as Freud did (or rather their German equivalents). But he seems to have decided that going all Latinate added an extra level of scienfiticality to the texts. I’m pretty sure this was Ernest Jones” doing: he was especially concerned to make sure that Freud and his ideas were taken seriously, and as seriously scientific.
The early days of psychoanalysis were rather free-form, and one of the motivations for the push to restrict its practice to physicians was to protect it, as a discipline, from being dominated by undisciplined amateurs.
Luke Z @120
I don’t want to hijack a comment you want to direct at JMG so begging your indulgence: it sounds like you’re onto what somebody like Brian Greene might say. Your ‘mental plane reality’ I interpret as ‘consciousness’ and your ’empirical reality’ I think is analogous to what Greene would call the space-time continuum. And so your consciousness intersects the space-time continuum, ie your slice of empirical realty comprising ‘now’, at something like 90 degrees. How far off-base am I? Anyway, words are slippery things and ‘time’ even more so.
I guess the questions then become where does consciousness come from and where does it reside? And why does it apprehend ‘time’ the way that it does?
LeGrand Cinq-Mars:
One of the differences between German and English-language science is that German tends to use Germanic words whereas English tends to use latin or greek roots (a classic example is Wasserstoff (lit. water matter) for Hydrogen). So it was idiomatic for the translator to use ego and id, as the I and the It would seem stranger in a scientific work from an English language perspective.
>generally limited to 6A at 240V due to concerns about the state of the average households internal wiring, and try charging a 50kWh car battery at that rate! It’s gonna take a while
Twinkle twinkle little star
P = I^2R
Up Above the World So High
P = VI
The nice part of RMS is that everything A/C works with the old DC formulas, as long as you’re using RMS values. So, 6A(240V) = 1440W. And 50000Wh/1440W comes out to about 35h. Yes, grab a snickers.
>the traditional season for stock market crashes
Ahem. There are two seasons. One you’ve noted is in the fall. The other is in the spring. Near the equinoxes. Can’t even begin to tell you why. One of those many questions I have that will probably never get an answer. Remember 2020 (to take an example)? Spring. The .com bubble? Spring. For some strange reason, the autumn equinox is watched carefully by the people in charge and there hasn’t been one happening there in a while. Amazing how quickly a bad chart can just turn around on a dime during that time. Not to say there won’t be one but I’m a bit skeptical when someone mentions autumn and crashes. Or, you’ll know things are out of control, if one does happen then.
Smith, I think that jives with what I’m saying!
Hi JMG,
I hope life is going well.
I just received my paper copy of “The Annotated Ring Cycle: The Rhine Gold” (Das Rheingold). Here are details:
An English Reading Version of ‘The Nibelung’s Ring by Richard Wagner.’
Translation and Annotations by Frederick Paul Walter.
Pen and Ink Illustrations by Cliff Mott.
Amadeus Press.
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Lanham, Maryland 20706 [USA]
rowman.com
2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
German, with English translation.
Description: “A colorful new translation and notes by Frederick Paul Walter spotlight the libretto, lyrics, and stage directions of [Richard] Wagner’s colossal masterpiece, getting the most basic ingredient right: the actual story! It is gorgeously illustrated with dazzling graphic-novel artwork, plus classic pictures by Arthur Rackham and others.”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 9781538136683 (paper)
ISBN 9781538136690 (ebook)
LCC ML50.W14 R42 2020 (print)
LCC ML50.W14 (ebook)
DDC 782.1/0268–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037543
LC ebook available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037544
The cover is muted colors of turquoise, green, and yellow.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1538136686/
——-
Table of contents
The One-Minute Ring page v
Chronology: The Composition of the Ring Cycle page vi
Introduction page vii
Prelude and Scene 1 page 3
Scene 2 page 33
Scene 3 page 75
Scene 4 page 105
About the contributors page 147
——-
One-Minute Ring
[where it says “god,” I substituted “gods.”]
A. Dwarf steals gold from river; gods recover gold but gives it to giants. (The Rhine Gold)
B. Gods scheme to recover gold from giant and return it to river; fails. (The Valkyrie)
C. Dwarves scheme to recover gold from giant and keep it; human keeps it instead. (Siegfried)
D. Dwarves scheme to recover gold from humans; fail. Human returns it to river. (Twilight for the Gods)
Time frame: Three generations.
Motives: wealth, fame, power, justice, fear of death, humane love, and sexual love.
Consequences: 1 attempted murder; 2 manslaughters; 3 capital murders; 4 adulteries; many combat mortalities; multiple betrayals; countless deceptions; mass enslavement; self-immolation; and full regime change.
Gee, the storyline sounds like now.
—-
I lucked out and got a “Used-Good” copy for $13, but in this particular case, the book looks near mint.
I think this is my Cliffs Notes.
💨Northwind Grandma💨⛏️🎹🎶
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi Owen,
🙂 Few folks these days would comprehend the implications of RMS when it comes to the delivery of their electricity supply.
Cheers
Chris
@J.L.Mc12
Interesting bit of synchronicity here. I picked up the same book last week at a local Op shop. Just started reading it this morning.
> Enjoyer, it’s almost impossible for a philosopher not to read his ideas into his sources — it all seems to follow so logically! My take on Schopenhauer, for all of that, is strongly influenced by my reading of Eliphas Lévi, Dion Fortune, and the early Taoists.
I think with Schopenhauer, it’s probably very healthy to read some of your own ideas into his philosophy. I don’t mean this as an insult to Schopenhauer- I think his philosophy is very cogent. But there is a human need for optimism, too much pessimism can drive one insane.
> I’ll consider your offer, but respectable thinkers generally shy away hard from actual practicing occultists, you know.
Unfortunately that is certainly the case. It’s pretty sad because I think Bernardo and other academics would really benefit from your perspective. If only they could step out of the box a little bit! Bernardo is a little bit shy of a ‘respectable thinker’- he’s definitely considered an oddball, with his anti-materialist worldview and unabashed discussion of UFOs, Jung, psychedelics, and ‘daimons.’ There’s a chance he would humor a discussion with you, he had a long discussion with Patrick Harpur and accepted Harpur’s submissions to his website. I would just be concerned the conversation could explode or that he wouldn’t give you the respect you deserve. He has VERY strong opinions on Trump and Ukraine.
Anyway, have a great week, looking forward to the post tomorrow.
Kan (#128)
True enough — German prefers to Germanize technical terms, whereas English tends to find Greek or Latin (or other) terminology, either invented or imported.
Sorry to protract this discussion, but the problems of translating Freud into English have a lot to do with the motives and aims of the translators, and do not reflect either a direct transcription or an attempt to translate the mood or style of the original texts. Anyone interested in this issue might want to take a look at Erik Linstrum’s “The Making of a Translator: James Strachey and the Origins of British Psychoanalysis” for a discussion of the choices made in developing a standard terminology (somewhat to Freud’s dissatisfaction), and the various explanations that have been produced for the medicalization of the terminology. (Journal of British Studies , JULY 2014, Vol. 53, No. 3 (JULY 2014), pp. 685-704)
The subject has been extensively discussed, and more recent translations have tended away from the model of standardized technical terminology and toward a model of literary translation. (For example, Adam Phillips, “After Strachey”, Vol. 29 No. 19 · 4 October 2007.) Phillips quotes one translator, John Reddick, on one of Strachey’s translations:
The agenda here (and elsewhere) is clear, and not a little pernicious: Freud’s writing is to be presented not as a hot and sweaty struggle with intractable and often crazily daring ideas, but as a cut-and-dried corpus of unchallengeable dogma.
So this is what I was gesturing at with the remark about Id/Ed and Ego/Ich. But the whole issue is such a kettle of monkeys that it might have been better to let sleeping translators lie.
I am always fascinated by the discussions of time here, although, I have only slowly been figuring out whether I myself might have anything to contribute…
“My take is that the extent to which each kiss, let’s say, embodies time past and time future varies considerably from person to person and is a remarkably subtle measure of a certain maturation of consciousness.”
This makes me wonder whether the issue is not only about how much future and past can be apprehended in any given present moment, but also about how much “flight” into imaginary futures and pasts can be relied upon (by some) in order to escape the present altogether.
The reason I say this is the extraordinary degree of what you might call “present-exclusion” I encounter in the clinic. Some people seem to choose to expend huge amounts of energy dwelling among past regrets (which cannot alter or change the past in any way), continually second-guessing themselves, or interrogating themselves as to why they did this or that, why they suffered this or that. Other people seem to choose to expend huge amounts of energy dwelling in fantasies of a non-existent future – that beautiful baby we can’t have, that soulmate of a boyfriend/girlfriend I can’t get, that dream job I don’t have, and so on… never (as you frequently point out on MM) doing anything in the present which sets them on a path of attainment.
It seems to me this may be mainly a matter of power (will?), which can most usefully (for an embodied being) be applied in the present through action. Or, to put it differently, as embodied beings, our power of action appears to limit us to THIS time and THIS place, because here and now are the only conditions in which our body, mind, soul, heart, etc are ALL present and accounted for – especially, of course, our body.
But if a person keeps avoiding expending ANY of their available energy upon their present, their past will endlessly consist of useless regrettings and overthinkings that provide no lessons to the present, while their future will consist of useless “don’t have, can’t get” fantasies that provide no direction or guidance to the present. Finally, the present itself will languish invisibly to the side, unable to retain their attention, or engage their energy, at all.
So, whatever the width of a person’s “time slice”, if they are deficient in the “present” time, their dallyings in past and future will be mere exercises in avoiding their own power to act, or perhaps (to speak in Schopenhauer’s language) avoiding (resting from?) their own will to act.
@Scotlyn (#136) wrote:
“our power of action appears to limit us to THIS time and THIS place, because here and now are the only conditions in which our body, mind, soul, heart, etc are ALL present and accounted for – especially, of course, our body.”
My take on all these limits is that every one of them (including our own eventual deaths) is one of the very greatest gifts we will ever get in our present lifetimes. As Miriam Simos wisely remarked, “It’s our limitations that keep us sane” (Starhawk’s mother, as quoted in her daughter’s The Spiral Dance).
Our material frames, our matter and energy, situated in time and space are simply not equipped to handle a life without limits. In the best cases, we would fall victim to Lord Acton’s dictum, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” In the worst cases, we would destroy ourselves and as many others as lie within our reach. Omnipotence and omniscience are simply unbearable.
And most people would rather talk endlessly about their problems than actually do the hard work of fixing them. That was they hope to get an endless supply of lazy comfort.
How much, if any, does this concept of will share with the notion of spirit (that is, the conjunt between body and soul in certain Western metaphysics)? Thinking it over, the one idea may preclude the other, as in the latter it seems that spirit is downstream from soul, whereas in Schopenhauer it would seem that consciousness derives from the will.
For my part, it seems as if our respective urges to impose our wills on the world is what results in most tragedies and frustrations, whereas it’s only yielding one’s invidual will to the Divine will that can bring about any serenity.
Axé
I’m late to the discussion, as usual. I read Steiner’s take-down of Kant, and was impressed with it at the time. He says, “Boy, there’s a lot of machinery to Kant’s view, which makes it unintuitive. It can’t be right.” Of course, psychology has spent the last century proving that Kant is right and Steiner is wrong, but Steiner wrote before that century.
I like Schopenhauer’s response to Kant, as you have described it. Looking solely at perception, as Kant did, leads to a passive model, of the mind perceiving the world through many faulty filters. But more of our brain is dedicated to action than to perception, to controlling and coordinating the muscles. Action and will is our way of reaching out to and learning about the world. It allows us to correct the fault filters; just move the head a little and an optical illusion disappears.
Will is, of course, the pagan element of fire. Air is thought separated from perception, working to envision and evaluate potential situations. The pagan elements represent a traditional theory of how the mind works. Funny that philosophy took so long to reach it.
@Scotlyn (#136)
You point out the importance of will, which keeps people from ruminating on the unchangeable past or fantasizing or worrying about the unknowable future. In his posts on The Doctrine and Practice of High Magic, JMG points out that regular religious practice increases will. It doesn’t matter what the practice is, JMG says, but consistency creates will.