Kant thought the noumenal,  the thing in itself ,was unknowable even though we can make assured postulates about it on moral grounds.

Schopenhauer’s original and striking suggestion: the thing in itself is really an irrational and limitless urge he called it “the Will to Live” the phenomenal world thus becomes the “objectification” of the primal Will the Will is sheer striving, without direction, goal or end.

The will is the noumenon that drives the world. However, i am possessed by it only if i identify with it. Is my will really me? In practicing non-identification, i avoid pain, dependence and inauthenticity and gain awakening to the full awareness of the experience of life. In Schopenhauer's words: "a man can do what he wants but not want what he wants". 

Thank you All for the precious information and for the opinions received,

Gianrocco

HARRY,

"a man can do what he wants but not want what he wants".

Allow me to make a slight but important "epistemological" amendment  

 "a man can do what he wants but cannot want what he wants"

Noumena in my reading has a static texture while Will has a dynamic one.

Dear Arno.

Since Will has a temporal parameter included we are in par

Neither i am an expert.

Regards.

The Human brain is able to accommodate the entire world. Number of connections of neurons in the Human brain exceeds the number of stars in the Galaxy. Therefore, every Human endowed with the gift of expression In accordance with the desires and the mind. So, Human is able to control his inner world, which holds the entire Universe.

Dear Gianrocco,

I did not read Schopenhauer, only read brief comments from various authors about his philosophy. From your description above  I will summarize his position as:  Our will is rooted into a drive/desire to live and this one is blind, irrational almost destructive and  lead to suffering and salvation/liberation consist of giving up the desire to live and this constitute awareness!!!!

Do you agree with the summary? I find this summarized position  negative and irrespecfull towards life where our hope have to be about almost against life, by liberating us from it, negating all our desires except the desire to stop the desire given by life. To point of a good life being to realize it is pointless and to wish liberation from it.  Why not simply kill ourself, this seem to be a straightforward liberation method!

CONSTANTINE

Yes, that' s probably what he meant. Do you know what he actually wrote in German?

In your reading: is the soul a noumenon or do you think that the soul  is a dynamic

process (an entelechy, according to Aristotle)? Using your expertise, would you say that

the serenity achiehed by Schopenhauer's non-attachment consists in giving a purely

supervenient role to mental states?

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Tucci,

An interesting question.

One of my teachers in graduate school was a Schopenhauer scholar, and I did read Schopenhauer--and connected texts and figures. Schopenhauer was, of course noted for his pessimism. One of the best things about him, as I recall, was that he scheduled his lectures at the same times as Hegel's --a little academic protest there. Schopenhauer provides the counter-metaphysics: "The real is the irrational, and the irrational is the real."

It would seem, on the face of Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will, that he makes nonsense of the concept of moral education or training of the will. Think of Aristotle's instructions for finding the "golden mean" for instance. Or, consider, too, the concept of  "the formation of democratic, political resolve (or will)." All such things must be illusions for Schopenhauer, it would seem --if the will is just intrinsically irrational and basically unfathomable and our "representations" all various kinds of self-rationalizations. 

Perhaps the most plausible image, suggested by Schopenhauer is that of the irrational, social-political-economic juggernaut: we might think of the tragedies of nationalism, international imperial competitions included, or the idea of the "military-industrial complex" controlling politics so as to keep itself in business. I'm sure that other examples could be found. I think of them all as essentially depending on mass "bandwagon effects."  There is always, then, something that people fear to question.

Another good example is markets and so-called "irrational exuberance." Toward the end of a big, bull market, people buy things, ignoring their actual character, the "fundamentals," simply because others are buying and the price is expected to go up. The idea is to resell later at a higher price. Political movements sometimes have a similar character, and people join up for fear of not being in on the expected victory.

Self-restraint is the beginning of virtue, both for individuals and for societies.

H.G. Callaway

Dear Gianrocco,

I recently watched the 8 lectures : Kierkegaard as a “Socratic Task” by Jon Stewart and from that I would not classify him with Hegel , no Schelling, nor Schopenhauer.  I am not saying that he does share some common traits with them.  He is strongly on the side of subjectivism of the individual (Truth is subjective and not an objective matter of agreement with ideas).  He used Socrates as his model to defend in a Socratic way what it is to be a Christian. And he has lived very consistently with his beliefs.  He was critical of the forging of public opinion by mass media and of the democratic age not unlike Tockqueville (see quote below).  He was the model of Jacques Ellul an Christian anarchism who did a deep analysis of the technological age.  Ellul thought that it was not Marx that demystified Hegel but Kierkegaard.  And he set himself the task to demystify : Marx, Nietzsche et Freud.

''After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always believed that this sort of servitude, regulated, mild and peaceful, of which I have just done the portrait, could be combined better than we imagine with some of the external forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.''

Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tocqueville also talks about the importance of “agitation” and “crisis” in creating the precondition for the expansion of state power;

Regards

No

Spinoza (1632-1677) and Schopenhauer (1788-1860).

Abstract. Schopenhauer' s elimination of suffering by a radical asceticism, which leads to the justification of suicide, is contrasted with Spinoza's ethics where the desire of life, called conatus, is a fundamental principle.

The will is the noumenon that drives the world. However, I am possessed by it only if I identify with it. Is my will really me? In practicing non-identification, I avoid pain, dependence and inauthenticity and gain awakening to the full awareness of the experience of life. In Schopenhauer's words: "a man can do what he wants but not want what he wants".  If so, the will is independent of our reason and independent in general. Therefore, Schopenhauer contradicts himself when he assumes that he can negate his will, even the irrepressible will to live.  Of course,  changing his mind, he may have proposed an alternative approach, in which freedom of choice is included, thereby allowing him to replace his desires by asceticism. But then, the philosophy of Spinoza which is also based on the fundamental desire to live, called conatus, becomes applicable. This philosophy has the advantage of avoiding Schopenhauer' s radical elimination of all the desires, leading him to justify suicide: "they tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice,,, that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which a man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person".

Spinoza  distinguishes between positive passions (or instincts) which increase our vitality and the negative ones which have the opposite effect. Only the negative passions are addictive and generate dependence and suffering. Therefore, suppression (not repression) by sublimating them into active forces should be applied only to the negative passions.

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Schopenhauer defined the force that is the universe as blind yet driven. He called this drive will, and he believed that it propels the behavior of people in the same way that it propels trees, rocks, gravity, weather, and all other things. He argued that the real source of all movement lies behind the scenes, invisible and as soulless as the waves that batter a shoreline hour after hour, millennia after millennia. He considered existence pointless, life a mistake.(pessimism).

Whether life is good or bad is subjective; because a purposeless, insentient universe would be incapable of error.

Spinoza said that all that is must be as it is, and he called all that is “god.” Worship, to him, meant embracing reality.  This is where he differed, positively, I think, from religions in which worship offers a payoff to the worshipper.  Spinoza’s worship was natural and unerring. He could have worshipped  while listening to music. His outlook was a happier  than Schopenhauer’s, although their basic interpretation of the universe was similar.  Spinoza came as close to living a life of beauty as is possible. He chose to spend his life grinding lenses for intellectual freedom .

 Dear Harry,

Spinoza conceived the Universe as an infinitly complex machine and call this machine God.  Each of us are a living machine, a machine with a conacus. What is the point of worship with such a conception where even God do not have a choice?Maybe the enjoyment of the feeling of praying and since there is enyoyment it is what our machinistic nature push us to do.  

Schopenhauer was a genius because he created something that can not be taught (the idea of genius originally belongs to Kant).

Therefore, the nature of Schopenhauer was free to choose the meaning of life.

Dear Louis,

I am sorry to read the conclusion of your message,

Gianrocco

Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche  are three philosophers which are philosopher in the ancient greek meaning of what it is to be a philosopher.  It has not so much to do witht  doctrine they subscribed; it has to do with what Pierre Hadot called philosophy as a way of life.  It is a religious philosophical living, more a quest of realization of an existential  truth.  Schopenhauer is more doctrinal than the other two which are mostly negative and instead of teaching doctrine tried through their litterary style to promote existential attitudes. Both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were profoundly against the christian religious institution of their time and place but Kierkegaard opposite it because because they were not truly christian and Nietzsche reject the whole of christianity for religious of power/master.  "Everything pitiful, everything suffering from itself, everything tormented by base feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul suddenly on top!" But some have argued tha what Nietzsche attempts to do is free Jesus from Saint Paul's dogmas.  I did not make my own mind Nietzsche yet.

Dear Gianrocco,

I am not totally certainif you are refering to my last post or the one before. But I suspect that you refer to : '' I did not make my own mind Nietzsche yet.''

You have to know that I have not yet read Nietzsche. I had received account of him that are very negative from philosopher that I really respected and I had received account of him that are positive from philosopher that I really respected. From the little part that I read Nietzsche I can feel his sincerity and his grounding in his experience.  I do not really get what it is yet with Nietzsche.  Is he about a promotion of ''power over other'' or Is he about ''compassion for other's suffering''?  This is a question I have.  Did you come to an answer for that question for Nietzshe?  I will have to read some of Nietzsche. Pascal said that there is a Monster and an Angel in each of us.  Even if one mostly explored and project the monster part of himself can enlighted us on this monster side of us and thus helping us less naive about ourself.

While reading this paper:

Kierkegaard vs. Nietzsche:

Discerning the Nature of True Christian Faith

http://www.sorenkierkegaard.nl/artikelen/Engels/062.%20Kierkegaard%20Nietzsche%20nature%20christian%20faith.pdf

after having read a number of Nietzsche attacks against the christianity of his place and time I thought that Kierkegaard had the answers to Nietzsche. The both saw the rational absurdities of christian faith but Kierkegaard saw this faith as the spring board for going beyond reason towards a true living which both searched.  One cannot be reminded of the garden of eden and the downfall resulting from eating from the tree of knowledge.  Faith whose breached was the original cause of the expulsion,  being here the mean of the return beyond reason. The age or reason had render made ''faith'' problematic and many christian philosophers starting with Descartes had tried to rationally defend christianity.  But already Pascal had seen such approach totally disconned and unsupportive of christian faith which was a living truth and not a rational truth and it is faith that allow to enter the living truth.  It has not much to do with accepting some religious dogmas in a childish way as those under the passion of the intellect sees it.  But it is about submitting the passion of the intellect under the passion of living together.

''Kierkegaard fears the advent of the world in which there will be a

terrifying surplus of theory over practice, in which more energy will be

spent on understanding life than living it, and in which the

institutionalized organization of ways of satisfying human needs will

drown out the real subjective sense of what is actually needful as life is

reduced to a ‘shadow existence’.''

Dear Louis,

Please read what i said of Schopenhauer contradicting his statement that man cannot want what he wants and then goes on  promoting asceticism by total self denial, There is also some contradiction or opposition in Spinoza's ethics between (i) the passive part of nature, which corresponds to your complex machine, which Spinoza calls NATURA NATURATA, responsible for our (positive, vitality increasing and negative, vitality decreasing) passions and instincts and (ii) the active part of nature which is beyontd the physical nature, which Spinoza calls NATURA NATURANS, Spinoza' s ethics invites us to free ourselves from the enslaving negative passions by sublimating them into active forces in the service of our active nature. You have probably noted the strong influence of Spinpza on Freud..

Harry,

I do respect Spinoza from the little I know of his philosophy but I cannot suffer the total boxing into a mechanical Nature.  Yes he is a suble thinker and he made a lot of distinctions which allows to explain some aspects of our nature.  He influence Leibniz as well and Leibniz improved the picture with his societal monadic view but still the picture is still captive of this Cartesian mechanistic spirit but it has several innovations that we still not have taken advantage scientifically  The sub-conscious is a very hold notion that transformed in my opinion in a very negative version.  First his theory is more a mythology than a theory.  But worst, it is a negative and poisonnous mythology where your subconscious is almost another person that might almost be your ennemy.  Jung is a huge improvement over Freud. But most religious tradition are 1000 time more deep than any modern scientific psychology. I would rather recommend astrology, the reading or card reading to Freudism because these are paid to make you feel good while Freud will make you feel bad.  I am sure that there are excellent Freudian therapeut but I take it that some people are so exceptional and warm and sensitive that they would make work anything. 

Dear Louis,

Spinoza is not "a captive of the Cartesian mechanistic picture". Spinoza is a necessitarian but a necessitarian in the Aristotelian (and religious) sense, he is NOT a modal necessarian as defined by Kripke: "if P is true then P must be true". The consequence of modal necessiterianism is that all properties are essential. Neither Aristotle, nor Spinoza nor Kant would agree with that,

Dear All,

your comments on what I wrote about Schopenhauer made me think further and, looki to supplement or specify what I said previously. Presently,  I wish to add the following, taking your observations into account.

The first interpretation of irrationalism is by Georg Lukacs (1885-1971), the  Hungarian Marxist philosopher who worked in the first half of the twentieth century. The passage is taken from the front pages of the Preface to the essay The Destruction of Reason (1954). In presenting his study, Lukacs defines succinctly the objectives and the basic thesis, according to which irrationalism of the nineteenth century was a reactionary response of the bourgeoisie to the emergence of the progressive forces.

The two forms of irrationalism: radical and moderate, as well as the controversy between rationalism and irrationalism, occurred continuously in the history of philosophy: examples are the philosophy of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, as well as certain forms of absolute mysticism as in Nietzsche, Bergson, James, etc. However, this is a concept too conditioned by its opposite to be valid as a discriminatory element between the various currents and philosophical doctrines.

In irrationalism the time of man's subjectivity is asserted radically and placed against the objectivity of he winning logic of progress and needs of the course of the world. Man knows and interprets the world through many faculties of knowledge. Reason ’works’ by selecting and interpreting  information through the principles and concepts; it operates much better as its object is emotionally distant from the thinking subject, the more knowledge can be isolated in its conceptual purity and purified from the sphere of sensitivity, pleasure and pain, the emotional tone that experience takes on. In this way, however, it eludes reason of what is more important, the essence of life.

"With the exception of man, no one wonders of its existence ... The philosophical marvel ... is conversely affected by a higher development of individual intelligence: this condition, however, is certainly not the only one, but is rather the knowledge of death, together with the view of the pain and misery of life, which undoubtedly gave the strongest impulse to the philosophical and metaphysical explanations of the world. Even those who opposed the abstract Hegelian metaphysics, as Arthur Schopenhauer will be renewed the charm of the essence, in its immutable purity, identified in the noumenal, unavoidable and relentless will to live compared to their phenomenal objectification, the world of things, of the Platonic “copies”.

If our lives were endless and without pain, no one would dream of perhaps wonder why the world exists, and why it was made just as it is, but this would be obvious. The "Irrationalist philosophies are not all pessimistic, like that of Schopenhauer: in all it is common the thesis that life is the dominant force, the essential element of the world. That life is ‘bad’, as claimed by Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard suspects, or the creative source of each value, as Nietzsche and Bergson think, in it the element of knowledge and that of emotion are inseparably fused: therefore philosophical research must be founded on a faculty of knowledge that captures the two elements together. The irrationalism has fought reason in the name of intuition.

In a first stage, the age of Schelling, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, irrationalism has fought the idea of progress that from the Enlightenment had come to Hegel: the idea of reason, that drives the development of culture and society, is denied, and this denial is "objectively" to the benefit of the forces fighting the rational progress of society, that is to the advantage of the social forces of conservation and reaction, contrary to the ideas of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and their outcomes in history of the early nineteenth century. Lukács does not intend to argue that the authors are fully aware of this cultural historic role; however, it intends to study their ideas in their historicity and their objective effects. For the strong belief that reality is governed by a negative principle, one can speak of Schopenhauer pandemonism, in antithesis of the Hegelian panlogism.

In a second phase, the age of Nietzsche, irrationalism is contrasted by the Marxist vision of the world almost become the heritage of the working class. The progress of society, moving towards the proletarian revolution according to the principles of "scientific" socialism (which played materialistically the dialectical reason of Hegel), finds an obstacle in the bourgeois culture and it is objectively slowed. In the Interpretation of Lukács, the phenomenon of irrationalism is then considered as a "destruction of reason," which leads "objectively" to fascism as a historical phenomenon for Germany and Europe. It is therefore to be interpreted primarily within the framework of the modern class struggle, even if the specific philosophy of individual thinkers may reserve many surprises, reported by Lukacs in his detailed study.

Gianrocco Tucci,

Here I echo some of your thoughts.

''irrationalism of the nineteenth century was a reactionary response of the bourgeoisie to the emergence of the progressive forces.''

The reaction to enlightment rationalism was not a rejection of reason per say but a rejection of the idea that humans are essentially being of reasons or should strive only to be being of reason. So by the mid-18th century people like Rousseau, and the german romantic litterary author began to proposed new ways to account for what we are with an emphasis of our subjectivity and its connection with Nature.  This romantic reaction occured before industrialisation and the emergence of working class movement of the 19th century.  

On the issue of progress there was different positions. The enlightment thinkers saw reasons as the key of progress in all spheres. The romantic were not unanymous about progress.  Starting with Rousseau some saw some decadence in the human spirit as resulting from civilisation restrictions  on human freedom and some like Hegel saw an marched toward more and more freedom, and other saw in the new coming democratic age as a possible age of mediocrity, an age where manufacturing of the public opinion, an age of alineation either by labor as Marx or alienation by being told what to think through mass media and an elimination of real individuality: tockville, Kiearkegaard.  Marx saw the massivisation and propaganda positively, as something to take advantage off for the labor movement. How to manifacture consent, propaganda has been central to ALL political system of the 20th century, form fascist, to communism, to democratic.  One of the major contributor to the theory of propaganda is Edward Louis James Bernays, the nefew of Freud and was smart enough to change the name to public relation. He felt this manipulation was necessary in society, which he regarded as irrational and dangerous as a result of the "herd instinct".  Since people in general are unable to think rationally for themself the elite has to engineer what they should thought or would have thought if they were able to think.

''If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.''

He called this scientific technique of opinion-molding the 'engineering of consent'.

Harry,

Like Descartes, Spinoza dimissed Aristotle final cause.  As I see it, Descates split the world in between the res extensa (the mechanical, what can be geometrized) and the res cogitans (self thinking) and Spinoza removed the spit and re-introduced all that was in the res-cogitans into the res extensa but he changed the res extensa by saying that that the regular res extensa of time and space is just one sub dimension of an res extensa that has an infinite number of modalities or dimension.  The res-cogitans of Descartes had some freedom by not being in the res extensa lost all of it once included in the res extensa of Spinoza that he called God which was as unfree as everything else.  It is like an infinite complex clock.  So I do not see where any kind of morality can hide for a finite cog in the infinite clock.  Spinoza inogurated the era of compatibilism where only appartent freedom can exist and apparent morality can exist and it exist in apparance only because the situation in infinitly complex and unknownable for the cog. I guess that following this way of thinking we should strive to be a good cog being conscious that we do not really strive because that too is determine as everything else. 

source of the followin: 

http://www.iep.utm.edu/spin-mor/

His res cogitans that is now mechanical is not limited to thinking but extend to the whole of subjectivity ans is driven that the conatus  “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being” . He distinguished activity from passivity. Something is active insofar as it produces various effects through its striving; conversely, it is passive insofar as it and its states are produced by external causes.For human mind, activity takes the form of rational or adequate cognition Actions of the mind are adequate ideas, which increase its power of acting, while passions of the mind are inadequate, confused ideas, which decrease its power of acting. “After men persuaded themselves that everything which happens, happens on their account, they had to judge that what is most important in each thing is what is most useful to them… Hence, they had to form these notions, by which they explained natural things: good, evil, order, confusion, warm, cold, beauty, ugliness” he does not advocate for the elimination of moral language.  “we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” what is ultimately of value is the satisfaction of desire; things become valuable only by virtue of their being desired, or their serving to satisfy some desire. This describe very well the lizard morality. reason “demands that everyone love himself, seek his own advantage...and absolutely, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can” ''In order, therefore, that men may be able to live harmoniously and be of assistance to one another, it is necessary for them to give up their natural right and to make one another confident that they will do nothing which could harm others… By this law, therefore, society can be maintained, provided it appropriates to itself the right everyone has of avenging himself, and of judging good and evil. ''

Would such morality bring about harmony? He reason that in the ideal case where all human would be rational then all would agree that it is in their best interest to behave harmoniously.  Leibniz more or less came to the same conclusion.  He was a diplomat and reasoned that in a far future that instead of resolving conflicts with war, all the diplomat would sit and start to calculate the best solution for all.

Spinoza hold that the physical activities of the body correlate exactly to the activities of mind. Most cognitive scientist today agree with Spinoza but I don't. In two words, what is forgotten in this picture is what is physiologically invisible, the whole of our mind.  Yes our mind absolutly need these physiological processes but it is not containt in them.  Our mind is what is constantly creating our body since that second of conception but cannot be seen since it is what is seeing. The creating is what is doing the embodiement and cannot be embody and only what is embody can be seen.  I belive the center of attention, the conscious nexus to correspond to location of failure and the location of learning and where creation happen only because there are choices at his nexus and no mechanism for that choice.

Irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche [EP]

Stephen Hicks,

http://www.stephenhicks.org/2010/02/16/irrationalism-from-kierkegaard-to-nietzsche-ep/

'' In Fear and Trembling we find Kierkegaard’s panegyric to Abraham, a hero of the Hebrew Scriptures who in defiance of all reason and morality was willing turn off his mind and kill his son Isaac. Why? Because God ordered him too.... Like Abraham, each of us must learn “to relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and to keep his soul fixed upon the absurd. Like Abraham, we do not know and we cannot know. What we must do is jump blindly into the unknown. Kierkegaard revered Abraham as a “knight of faith” for his willingness to “crucify reason” and leap into absurdity.”

Dear Louis,

in this very intriguing exchange of information and ways to express personal evaluation on different school of thought, I have the following considerations to express, mainly from an economic point of view and searching for an assessment in what I call a ‘tentative shift’ from neoclassic to cognitive economics and from there considering the values and group consent in modelling individual conformism as some kind of rational response to social norms. It is a question of having an open awareness about what can constitute utility. In that perspective the theme is: emotions, values and social norms as they are internalized by the individual and included into economic models. They surely have an impact on the shape of the utility function and are capable to provide a richer background that could figure out the actual behavior of persons, thus bringing Homo economicus and Homo reciprocans closer together. All that admitting the role of feelings in the determination to act and of institutions in deciding how to act. Then, personal experience and emotions, social learning through the imitation of other’s people most frequent behaviour, values and norms of conduct that are made his own by the docility to accept them, constitute arguments to be included in the function itself. Emotions and social norms share something peculiar that seriously restrain rational conformity. In fact, quite often, a social norm consists in an imperative advise to act in a non-rational manner as in the case where it may entail the initial sacrifice of individual interests to profit the group to which an individual belongs, even though the group itself may eventually switch the benefits received to him as well as to his companion members. I wish to recall that it may even be that humans have some “altruistic” drives for helping others in the sense that they are motivationally inclined to model individual conformism as some kind of rational response to social norms. It is a question of having an open awareness about what can constitute utility. In that perspective, emotions, values and social norms as they are internalized by the individual and included into economic models, are figured to have an impact on the shape of the utility function and are capable to provide a richer background that could figure out the actual behavior of persons, thus bringing ‘Homo economicus’ and ‘Homo reciprocans’ closer together. All that admitting the role of feelings in the determination to act and of institutions in deciding how to act. Then, personal experience and emotions, social learning through the imitation of other’s people most frequent behaviour, values and norms of conduct that are made his own by the docility to accept them, constitute arguments to be included in the utility function. Emotions and social norms share something peculiar that seriously restrain rational conformity. In fact, quite often, a social norm consists in an imperative advise to act in a non-rational manner as in the case where it may entail the initial sacrifice of individual interests to profit the group to which an individual belongs, even though the group itself may eventually switch the benefits received to him as well as to his companion members. I wish to recall that it may even be that humans have some “altruistic” drives for helping others in the sense that they are motivationally built for strong reciprocity, in which their behaviour is superintended by social norms.

I am aware that the process I have described have also significative philosophical implications. For instance, think of the philosopher of the Enlightenment M.J. de Condorcet in his work ‘Esquisse of a tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humain ': ‘the time will come where on earth the sun will shine only on free men, who do not recognize themselves above other gentleman if not the reason, since tyrants and slaves, will exist only in history books’ (Paris 1963, p. 345).

East-West Cultural crossover.

In one of his most influential critical works, the Hongloumeng  Pinglun Critique of Dream of the Red Chamber, 1904）, Wang Guowei defines Dream of the Red Chamber as a unique work in the history of Chinese literature: “a Tragedy from the very beginning to the end.”.

It was conventionally viewed that Wang’s idea of tragedy was borrowed from Schopenhauer, especially the pessimistic side of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Through exploring the meaning of the idea of tragedy, especially “the third kind of  tragedy in both Wang’s and Schopenhauer’s work, I will in this paper to show that there is a double movement in Wang’s borrowing from Schopenhauer.

We will find that what was traditionally viewed as a Chinese practical application of Schopenhauer’s philosophical theory was actually a double movement of application (action) and reaction --- both for and against Schopenhauer --- as well as an application of traditional Chinese thinking juxtaposed with Western thinking. From the idea of tragedy, Wang Guowei recovers his Chinese cultural orientation in his encounter with Schopenhauer.

Dear Gianrocco,

It is the landmark of rationalist thinkers such as Spinoza and Leibniz to naturally come to equate rationality and utility and see it compatible with mutual utility as a goal that would be reach by rational thinkers.  The morality of Kant follow this pattern.  The utilitarian see social good as maximization of the utility good.  Adam Smith see individual maximization of utitlity (greed) as leading to common good.   Rationality, what the intellection can expressed and understand clearly, and best expressed mathematically, what scientific model allow to interact with nature in this utility mode .   Not everything can enter that world that best could be described as the material world.   Can the homo love/caring belong to the material world, the world of utility? The homo love relate with Others not as strangers but as mother to her child , as a ‘’inseparable us’’.   The homo love is a communal being that maximize common  good not in the sense of common material good but in the sense of maximum common caring.  How can we tweak the economic system that maximalize financial gain and concentration of capital towards common caring.  How can caring enter finance?  Right now, 62 individuals own 50% of the total world capital and the road towards concentration accelerated.  Oviously the maximization of the vast majority of the capital is decided by a incredibly small number of agents for their own capital increased.  What kind of change can tweak the economic dynamic towards caring?  Presently, money creation is based on debt creation which is a promess to pay capital plus interest.  How can money creation be tweak so it become a promess to care to the Bank of Caring for Humanity?

Almost all of science can be resumed 

1. unambiguous language (mathematicians)

2. space and time framework: geometry (Greeks, Galileo,Descartes)

3. Calculus (Leibniz, Newton)

3. Principle of minization of action  (Leibniz)

4. all forms of action convertible in the notion of energy (Helmothz)

5. probability and statistic or the a priori science of prediction (Pascal, Fermat, ..)

In economic theory: action is utility and energy is money and all of the above are used

The principle of conservation of energy correspond to money creation by dept

The principle of conservation of energy is equivalent to both the closure of the physical world and to the invariance of the laws of physics with respect to time.

Edith Stein in her youth was for a while the first assistant of Husserl and work out a theory of empathy where she challenge this principle of closure of the physical world, she saw conceived human as being leaking into an spiritual energy domain of caring.  She was really not a naive thinker, at the time she was a hard head atheist philosopher  but one who was about caring and who later convert to catholism; she did not have the time to complete her work because she was executed in Auschwitz.  Maybe there is a way to subsume utility to care.

Husserl saw the rise of anti-semitism in Europe and in Germany; he saw the rise of the type of ideas attracting the youth in these difficult time.  Although Husserl never commented on any of the political specific of those time, he  lectured at Prague in 1935 and Vienna in 1936, which resulted in the publication in 1936: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl described Western science as in the process of formalizing lived experience for the purposes of precise explanation and prediction, excised from its reality-construct a a whole range of characteristics which render that experience humanly meaningfull.  Husserl regarded this procedure as in itself legitimate.  What is problematic is the next step – taking this reduced reality-construct for reality itself, effectively FORGETTING or ‘’stepping over’’ the ground on which that construct is based.  Western science – and Western rationality in its present mode – have lost the ability of providing an orientation for human activity because they have lost touch with their human grounding.  If reason declares itself incompetent in questions of meaning, that whole fundamental realm falls by default to irrationalism.

Patocka who live those time in Prague, and who were then was closed to Husserl and who will live the the next three decade said that the defeat of  National Socialism did not bring on an age of rationality but rather revealed the fundamental irrationality of an autonomous technical rationality as such, not only its Nazi guise.  

Interestingly, Schopenhauer thought is quite accessible and understandable to many. But people are busy secondary reading. And avoid the revelation of a talented philosopher.

VLADIMIR

Scopenhauer believes that the world is driven by the Will, a continual striving activity aiming in all directions, an unconscious, irrational force that is present in all nature. Such a theory does not agree with the fact that there are laws of nature and that thess laws are remarkably constant over millions of years and everywhere in space. Do you know how Schopenhauer deals with this problem?

Dear Louis,

your thoughtful intervention suggested me the following considerations.

It was Kant who called  "transcendental philosophy" the study of the sources and limits of knowledge obtained through the activity of the pure understanding and its a priori forms. In this respect, Kantian metaphysics is a science of pure concepts, whereby the knowledge derived from it abstracts from every experience. The historical continuation of the Kantian metaphysics is found in Husserl, who, however, does not refer to the most general principles, but to those that form the foundation of a science or group of sciences. It follows a "regional" ontology, in which each science bases its factual data and experience. N. Hartmann, instead, turns back to a general ontology, founded, like Husserl, on the phenomenological assumption: he distinguishes between ‘being’ and entity and puts this as object in the ontology, highlighting it in the way in which ‘being’ is given to ' phenomenological experience’.

Later, in the twentieth century, the term "Transcendentalism" came to be applied almost exclusively to metaphysical doctrines of idealism. In addition to this, Husserl introduced the method of phenomenological reduction, which proceeds through the epoché and the transcendental reduction not only to suspending judgment on the existence of the world, but also to bring it back to pure or absolute subjectivity.

Husserl's phenomenology, with the result of later developments that refer to it, has among the best known the "Theory of values" of Max Scheler and “The problem of the spiritual being” by Nicolai Hartmann. It is to all effects of a throw-in of the spirit, as much in terms different and more sophisticated, with the use of new terms and expressions of it.

Contemporary philosophy has definitely moved away from a purely conceptual speculation on the matter, with a few exceptions (including just Edmund Husserl who gives a phenomenological analysis). For him, reflection is identified with ‘conscience’ whereby one must distinguish a pre-philosophic  moment of "natural" reflection and the more aware of "phenomenological" consideration, that is when the conscience "put in brackets", suspends, the belief that the material world be transcended in relation to the life of conscience itself.

The necessary reference of conscience towards an object is called by Husserl, in the work ‘Ideas for a pure phenomenology’, "intentionality" and this meaning has penetrated into contemporary research, both in continental and analytic philosophy.

Under the influence of Brentano, Husserl still conceives phenomenology as descriptive psychology. He analyzes the intentional structure of mental acts and how they can be directed to objects both real and ideal. Logical research beginning with a devastating critique of psychologism, i.e. the attempt to absorb the logic in psychology. Husserl claims for logic, philosophy and phenomenology, a proper field of research, not underneath the empirical sciences.

I would like to take this opportunity to underline that it is significant that just the greatest successes of modern science have also caused the most serious crises, highlighting the constraints to research, the ambiguity of theories, the philosophical inconsistencies, the           ll ideological degeneration. To be precise, the crisis is of the scientist culture, which claims to clear any classic value, making sterile the techno-scientific thinking, opposing it to the philosophical, theological and ethical thought and preventing access to a creative and critical wealth of immense value. Husserl vigorously denounced this crisis as a crisis of the West, engaging modern sciences, philosophy, culture and existence. Today, to his critics new ones are added about the inability to explain the complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and disturbance in the universe. Yet the discovery of the interactions between order, disorder, chaos and organization, and the antagonisms of any kind, shows how the current scientific paradigms are fallible and insufficient.

 All the best,

Gianrocco

Dear Harry! Schopenhauer believed that "the essence of things to the world, or on the other side of the world, and, consequently, on the other side Will study is not available." Schopenhauer believed that the one who wants to understand the essence of his philosophy, he should carefully read each line of text. So, it is easy. It is necessary only to find a lot of time.

Dear Gianrocco,

Two year before his death Husserl wrote the Crisis of ... and three year before the WWII which is a high point in the Crisis and not the last unfortunatly.  Husserl is then in a mode of evalutation of his whole life effort and tries to see what is happening into an historical philosophical perspective of the Eurepean modernity.  He is less in the mode of promoting his phenomenology than in the mode of focusing on what is wrong , what went wrong, what is the nature of the crisis.  He see that philosophy is not in this time of crisis providing the answers that would be necessary, that philosophy has retreated from giving these answers, that philosophy has even promoted the views that there is no answers to what really matter for humans, on the biggest questions that philosophy used to address and that christian theology used to address and now at the time of the storm it is now evident that  the house is built on  sand.  Three centuries prior to those time, at the time of a crisis of Western Christendom , the 30 years War , there was a group of Millenium reformed european christians who had a program for European humanity that might have avoided what has been our history, a general european secularisation.  Among them was the father of modern western education: Jan Amos Komenský (1592-1670) also known as Comenius.  Comenius then addressed the newly created Royal Society whose views then reflected those of Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza that we should base education not only one book, the book of Nature i.e. the study of what is visible with the senses but on Three books: the book of Nature, the book of Reason (Man), the Bible (God).  By the book of Reason means the human Mind created at the image of God which provides us with providential intuition.  Like Pascal in the same period, he saw that the revelation in the Judeo Christian tradition as the reveletion of the same light as the one revealed in the other two book but this time through prophetic interpretation of history through the age.  So Comenius was a man of science, reason , and Faith and saw the three as coming from the same light and totally irreduceble to each other.  Comenius had a meeting of 4 hours with Descartes and Descartes commented that Comenius was wrong in trying to mix religion with science of Nature.  Comenius commented that only focusing on the book of Nature will lead to nihilism and  threat to the unity of knowledge. So our world is the world of Descartes, the world of parts, the world than fell apart because we did not choose then the world of Comenius, the world of the Whole/Panharmonia.  I find Pascal's catholic position much closer to Comenius reformist position than the position of Descartes the Jesuit catholic position.  Here we see a divided not located at the catholic protestant divided.  I see Kant's transcendalist idealism as a deformation of Comeniusm's book of Reason.  Kant honestly intended to save freedom and christian morality from the reduction of all to the Book of Nature and so constructed the second book of Reason, the a priori transcendal knowledge.  But while Comenius book of reason which was a platonist one was transparent to the light of God, the one of Kant was totally opac and was used as a road block to the book of Nature allowing morality to free itself.  But this opacity, the severing of the thing in itself created a crisis and this has created false way out in total relativistic freedom.  Goethe and Herder, and Maine de Biran are the first to find the way to link the different books but yet in vague ways.  Goethe is really the first phenomenologist before the letter.  Herder/Vico are the first to see the importance of history, culture , tradition , interpretation for access to the truth.  Husserl phenomenology is center subsuming scientific objectivisation into an experiential reason.  But contrary to Geothe delicate empicism it is not engaged and fully participatory.  His bracketing is passive very much like the experience of meditation.  I practiced meditation on a daily basis for 15 years and it naturally lead us towards a kind of distance towards what is experience.  The participatory phenomenology of Goethe is a art based approach to science where the scientist is not objectifying but is participating in the phenomena and get insight in this participation.  Here the book of reason and the book of nature are meeting.  I will close this rather long post here.

Jan Amos Comenius - the teacher of nations

http://www.radio.cz/en/section/czechs/jan-amos-comenius-the-teacher-of-nations-1

Regards

 Dear Vladimir,

As mentioned in my previous post, nature behaves according to laws. There is no irrationality in this behavior. Man is the only exception: irrationality made possible as the antithesis of rationality. Thus, only man does not have a determined nature, This gives him, thanks also to his intellect, a remarkable potentiality for the better or the worse. This is the basis for Sartre's existentialism. The extraordinary possibilities of Man were described in Pico della Mirandola's admirable manifesto: Oration on the Dignity of Man. Due to his remarkable potentiality, man can become the image of God and thus acquire a non-mediated knowledge of God.  

Dear Harry! In reality, we see the applicability of rationalism and irrationalism, sometimes in similar situations. Because knowledge of the world depends on the characteristics of human thinking, the characteristics of the environment in which a person carries knowledge, religious beliefs human. Life is both rational and irrational.

Right you are. Vladimir. that is what makes life so exciting. Ascetism is not my cup of tea. If I were to propose a Kantian noumenon.it would be JOY.

Put  in "Romantic" terms Beethoven's 9th Ode to Joy

Dear Constantine,

While the obscure Hegel claimed that rational is real and real is rational, the pessimistic Schopenhauer said that irrational is real and real is irrational. It did not occur to Hegel that life is the synthesis of rationality and irrationality (see Vladimir Kulchitsky's answer) and that joy is the life of life. You have crowned joy with its vibrant musical soul: the finale of Beethoven's ninth symphony.  

Does a newborn want to die?

Thank you, Harry.

Rafael,

does she/he know what to die means?

Gianrocco

Gianrocco,

I think the newborn's attitude is to live in the world. How this attitude is codified in its being I don't know.

And vice versa, a will to knowledge, both as means not ends, with driving the world as mere happenstance or byproduct of again the ineffable.

Dear Cj! Sorry, and what was the main motive to place an ingenious piece of the picture of Michelangelo in your answer?

Thank you for asking, dear Vladimir.  Much as Einstein found the speed of light cannot be exceeded in a vacuum, the space between a Creator and Creation depicts or reminds most importantly that we are not the Creator, Prime Mover, First Cause, but an image in Michelangelo's own great rendition of this Creation.

Gianrocco, I have been curious to know who looks over your shoulder in your photo, please?

Schopenhauer compares the will to a blind man and reason to a sighted man with no legs.  The sighted man (reason) provides direction on where to go, but the blind man provide the force of movement.  However, though these many work together (as in the image of the sighted man being carried on the back of the blind man), they are not equal partners: The blind man does not need the sighted man in order to move or act.  However, the sighted man who has no legs is impotent without the blind man.  So the will has the upper hand over reason.  Thus, although Schopenhauer accepts that reason can acquire knowledge, that knowledge is simply an understanding of the most efficient and reliable means to achieve one's ends.  But reason itself does not determine the ends to be achieved.  It is the will that does this.  So, reason is simply an instrumental faculty and is ethically neutral.  It is the will, depending on what motivates it, that can either be classified as good or bad.  For Schopenhauer, there are three possible motivations for the will.  The will can either be moved by egoism (which neither implies helping other nor harming them), by compassion (helping others), or by malice (harming others).  Egoism is ethically neutral since, in itself, it involves neither helping nor harming others, while compassion is ethically good and malice is bad.  The most fundamental motivation of the will is egoism and self-preservation.  However, Schopenhauer argues that, once one understands the difference between will (Wille) as reality and representation (Vorstellung) as appearance, one sees that the four aspects of the principle of sufficient reason only govern appearances and not reality itself.  Thus, for example, the differentiation that governs representations is merely an 'illusion' and does not apply to reality itself or the will.  Therefore, will (ultimate reality) is one and undifferentiated.  Once one understands this and becomes 'enlightened' to the true nature of reality and will, one realizes that self-preservation is really preservation of all, the other is one's self, and the other's suffering is one's own, and one is then motivated by compassion (helping others, since that is tantamount to helping one's self).  On the other hand, the unenlightened individual who does not understand his oneness with all reality cannot achieve compassion.  For those unenlightened individuals who do not see their own self-preservation as being in conflict with that of others, they will simply be motivated by egoism (which is neither good nor bad).  But for those unenlightened individuals whose self-preservation is interpreted as being in conflict with that of others, those individuals will be motivated by malice (which is ethically bad since it leads to harming others).  Schopenhauer is here both inspired by Kant's constructivism in the first Critique while also rejecting the notion that reason can motivate the will found in Kant's second Critique.  He is, of course, also loudly rejecting the Absolute Idealism of Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling that conflates reality and representation.  Essentially then, for Schopenhauer, enlightenment involves a sublimation of the ego that comes from philosophical understanding that ultimate reality is undifferentiated.  Only then can compassion truly become a motivation for the individual will, in the realm of representations.

Dear Marina Banchetti,

my compliments  for your ‘dense’ and intelligent contributions to the discussion.

I have a few considerations to make, partly already included in RG Questions.

The irrationalism of Schopenhauer's thought is found in the theory of life as a blind manifestation of an arbitrary and alternative principle to reason: an irrepressible will to live, unbridled and irrational, that does not  pursue any phenomenal purpose other than to increase itself. The will to live produces pain but not for itself or for an evil connotation, because it is pure "noumenon". Pain, in fact, is born when the will to live objectifies in bodies that - wanting to live - express a continuing tension, never satisfied, to that life which appears to them as always missing than they would like. The more you have lust for life, the more is the suffering.

Schopenhauer asks man a rational and moral task of liberation from pain through self-denial of the will to live: asceticism.

Arguing that "only the elimination of the will of life in general can free us," not completely devalues the role of reason, conceived as a platonic expression of life itself that wants to know becoming self-conscious". The will is the thing itself of Kant; and Plato's idea is fully adequate and exhaustive knowledge of the thing itself, is the will as an object. "

This awareness coincides with the self-denial of the will, and thus allows to leave the senseless cycle of desire, death and rebirth.

Therefore, in relation to the above, there is to consider that the absolute irrationalism concerns teachings which insist on the absurd, senseless, without any purpose of reality.

These universal questions, defined as the problem of the relationship between the individual and the world, between the subject and the object, are treated by philosophy according to two aspects: the first is that of theoretical philosophy, which studies the scope of knowledge, the second is that of practical philosophy, or morality or ethics, which deals with the behavior of man towards the objects and, in particular, of those objects that are other men, whom he suspected are individuals like him, because they appear similar to him, despite not really knowing them beyond outward appearances.

Thank you for reading and best regards,

Gianrocco Tucci

Marina,

I made my opinion on Schopenhauer based on econdary texts, like yours above, commenting on Schopenhauer.  You made him clearer to me but at the same time I see some discrepencies between your description and the main impression I had formed.  The main discrepency has been pointed out by prof. Giaanrocco Tucci in his last post: 'Schopenhauer asks ...self-denial of the will to live''.  In your account, the egotistic will is morally neutral and may find its way to the compassionate will, realizing that the false illusion that the ego is separated from the others and the One reality. We see here the influences of Upanishads and Buddhism.   But in your account we do not see this necessity of self-denial to live.  Which I think Schopenhauer advocated .   

Kant advocated a will clinging to non-egoistic reason.  Schopenhauer undermined reason as being disconnected with reality and locate the connection with reality as being primary in the will but then see this only connection as primary negative and see salvation into its denial.  An extreme Christianity.  Jesus advocated giving one life for love of other, suffering for the sake of alleviating other suffering; but not suffering for suffering;  

Under the influence of the Upanishads and Buddhism, Schopenhauer probably had in mind the liberation from the world of af appearences considered as vanity of vanities (Ecclesiastes) or as Karma,, Samsara and the veil of Maya. He certainly did not intend to deny the formless Dharma. In Nietzche's words: Der Mensch will lieber das Nichts wollen als nicht zu wollen.

The irrational will to live leads , according to Professor Tucci's interpretation of Schopenhauer's philosophy, to the self denial of the will to live in the world of appearences. This denial is enacted by asketicism. On the other hand, Professor Marina Banchetti teaches that enlightenment, as seen by Schopenhauer, denies only a narrow-minded egoism. This narrow-minded egoism is encouraged in a hedonistic society where every satisfaction of an unsatiable will leads to more and more demands thereby blocking the road to enlightened compassion as the sublime expression of egoism. Thus we have an inverse relation between hedonism and enlightenment or a direct relation between asketicism and enlightenment.

A revised version of the previous post.

The Will as noumenon is beyond space, time and causality. However, in the world of appearances, the will is the root of causal determinism. The pessimism of Schopenhauer results from the fact that in reality the principle of sufficient reason does not work to our satisfaction: most of our desires are left unfulfilled, causing suffering. Those desires that are fulfilled are experienced as pleasure by the fact that they remove  painful tensions. However, the fulfilled desires are soon replaced by unfulfilled ones. The realization that the Will is beyond causality allows us to refrain from enacting our insatiable individual will once we are convinced that in reality it mostly causes frustration. This attitude leads to asceticism as a strategy to weaken our individual will and to free us from our addictions. We are then in a position to realize that the Will is beyond space and time and thus beyond differentiation. Therefore the individual will is an illusion and narrow-minded egoism is counter-productive. This opens the road  to enlightened compassion as the sublime expression of egoism and establishes the direct relation between asceticism and enlightenment.                             

Will develops mind

One other point needs to be made before leaving this section, and then we will turn briefly to a passage in Die Welt that summarizes Schopenhauer's philosophy.

The point is this: As will evolves into living things, it develops consciousness (or mind, or what Schopenhauer calls "knowledge" in order to help will achieve its wants. We see even in most plants, for example, some elemental awareness of where light is coming from. The plant's "will" needs light, and it has developed some minimal level of awareness of light so that its will can seek out that light and get what it wants. Animals have more advanced degrees of consciousness in order to help their more distinct development of will achieve its needs. And human beings have developed a relatively rich level of consciousness to help their wills meet their needs.

Now we turn to the summary of Schopenhauer's philosophy we shall see that this one short paragraph is a very tight summation of Schopenhauer's entire philosophy. here it goes:

Destined originally to serve the will for the achievement of its aims, knowledge [what we call consciousness] remains almost throughout entirely subordinate to its service; this is the case with all animals and almost all men.

That is, almost all humans have only enough consciousness, or mind, to help them meet their will's needs. But some few humans seem to have been born with an excess of consciousness, more than is necessary merely for the purposes of serving that will's needs, and it is that extra level of consciousness that allows these people to "see" more than others can see. Schopenhauer continues:

In the case of individual persons, knowledge can withdraw from this subjection, throw off its yoke, and , free from all the aims of the will, exist purely for itself, simply as a clear mirror of the world; and this is the source of art. Finally,  we see how, if this kind of knowledge reacts on the will, it can bring about the will's self-elimination, in other words, resignation. This is the ultimate goal according to Schopenhauer, and the innermost nature of all virtue and holiness, and is salvation from the world. 

Schopenhauer makes the point of how things are. We might call this his metaphysic, his description of the fundamental nature of being. And it's not a very pretty picture. Life is full of suffering and we are living in a world of illusion. That's just how it is.

We can now ask, Is there any hope? Are we entirely stuck in suffering and illusion, or is there any way to transcend these conditions of being in the world?

Schopenhauer answers that there is hope, but not very much. There isn't much hope because in order for there to be hope a person must see how things really are. If a person is about to be attacked by a tiger or is about to be fired from their job or is about to flunk a course, or is about to be hit by a truck, if they are blithely unaware that this travesty is about to befall them then there isn't' much hope for them at all. In a similar way, if a person is not aware of the real state of affairs in the world, there is not much hope that their suffering can be overcome. But if they are aware of the bear or the risk to their job or aware of the oncoming truck, then there may be hope for them. Most people, says Schopenhauer, are just not aware of the real situation in the world (which he has been describing for us) and so for them there is no hope at all. For the person who is aware of the real situation in the world, though - that it is a world of suffering, will, and illusion - for that person there is hope.

The encounter with the beautiful, which we will call aesthetic contemplation. critiicism, or self-denial, i.e., the practice of turning the will against itself as a way of extinguishing its power. .