Schopenhauer's Ding an Sich and the wordless prayer.

Foots

    "The World as Will and Representation" was a book first published in 1818. A second two volume edition was published in 1844.

   Reacquainting ourselves with the spelling of Schopenhauer's name reminds me how much I enjoy his understanding of Will and how much sense it makes to me. What hints at his character and genius will in my last days remain his assurance to me and to anyone who would listen that Hegel was a charlatan, a chicken shit - my words - and a paid lackey of the Prussian State. 

   Difficult to think of Schopenhauer as anyone's disciple, his purpose in life seems to have been to ferociously disagree with everyone on principle, but lucky for his disciples he was able to give us all hope by fundamentally disagreeing with Kant on one very important aspect of Kant's thinking.

  Kant's thing-in-itself, his ding an sich - the true underlying reality - was unknowable. Schopenhauer's ding and sich was very knowable because we can feel it, experience it, it was there whether we liked it or not, nothing we could do about it, and essentially it was the source of all misery, discord and the awfulness of having to go though life as a human. Hegel was a moron, a weak minded idealist.....

    "Can you remind me what it was?"

    Schopenhauer called it The Will. It wasn't thoughtful, it wasn't conscious - consciousness for Schopenhauer was derived from the brain, consciousness was put there to serve as an indentured servant to The Will -  the will itself  had no plan or reason, it had no clue what it was doing, it was an endless, whining, urge to exist, force itself onwards into ever expanding nothingness, it was quite insatiable.

   And it was everywhere, in the sea, the mountains, on the way up to his rented rooms, it was in plants, animals, even in the seamstress who took him to court for pushing her downstairs because she was talking to loudly to his neighbor while he was busy solving the problems of the universe.

   The world and everything in it was a representation of The Will, and depressing though it was, its true underlying reality was absolutely knowable. And yes indeed, a lonely life was his, a Saint in a land of the heathen, until he came across a a book called Oupnek'hat - translates as 'Secrets to be Safeguarded.' 

   The book that gave Schopenhauer what he called  "the solace of my life and the solace of my death" was published in 1801 in Berlin. It was a Latin translation of a 17th Century Persian phonetic rendering of a Sanskrit text which contained the Upanishads, or some of them. The Upanishads are a collection of hymns from the late Bronze early Iron Age in North Western India that greatly contribute to later movements of thinking within the many and splendid directions of the Hindu Religion. 

   "Schopenhauer found solace?"

   He did. He called it solace, no holding back, he wasn't ashamed to admit Oupnek'hat was a comfort from anguish. Like many he was generally disgusted by the inadequacies and convictions of conventional theism, but more than that the Vedic texts confirmed his own directions in philosophy, and it's always good for us people to bathe in those moments when we don't feel shunned, alone and surrounded by idiots.

   Instead, as confirmed by the ancient texts, the world was an illusion, a veil of multiplicity, a subjective abundance, the truth so much deeper, the best you could do is belong to it. Liberation from suffering was a denial of will, quietness, renunciation and the death of ego. But again, Schopenhauer didn't completely agree with scholarship from the East, he was still totally miserable, doggedly going were few had been before him. 

   The  understanding of the underlying Will he shared with the Hindu tradition remained what he thought of as a unity reaching out, always reaching. But, as the Vedic scholars saw it the Gods didn't come first, they came afterwards, their underlying Will like Schopenhauer's had always been, not as a blind all-encompassing unity of some sort of un-directed purposelessness, it was a supreme intelligence, it was absolute unity, it was bliss, it was Teresa of Avila's wordless prayer that god was more than words, that god was real.

   Yes indeed, to loosely quote our man, "reading is thinking with another's mind," and thinking with another man's mind just wasn't something Schopenhauer was prepared to do.

Ice, The Comma and Interpretation

Frost Advisory Tonight

     A more real - a 'correcter' version of the suspect word realer - understanding of what is truly in the world would hold fast to the idea that nothing has a name.

    This realer understanding might point out that language is a naming tool which captures the movement of idea, silences it by converting it into a stopped object that can be fed through a funnel - a sentence - the essential structure of which is a straight line. Call this straight line a rule bound chain of connections that abjures any rejection of the rules, a misbehavior which in the past couple of years has been variously named 'hallucination,' 'hack,' 'last days of humanity'..... it's a long Madison Avenue worthy list, which in the legal world might be titled  'Misplaced Comma.'

    Let's have a look at the hallucinogen of misplaced commas.

    Rather than mention that ghoul Scalia's interpretation of a comma in the Second Amendment, it's up there alongside the absurdity of the contents of the Arc of the Covenant, consider this dedication - "To my parents, Mother Teresa and the Pope." Then there's a television program about Peter Ustinov's summer holiday - "Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."

    And the Oakhurst Dairy Case, Maine Labor Law and who gets overtime pay where a court decided that these words in the 1995 update to the statute "....the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of...." without a comma after 'shipment,' meant that drivers who did the actual physical distributing by driving the delivery vehicles rather than the packing for shipment and distribution, were, despite the lack of a comma, indeed entitled to overtime pay.

    The tune is played, joy to the world, then along come the grammarians, written word monitors, a Gestapo which to keep us fat round and ever more frightened of misplaced commas has since 2003 been called the ICE of language. In the Maine Labor Law case Oakhurst Dairy, its lackeys, the my profits not yours hyenas and other hangers-on had to find between five and ten million dollars to pay drivers their mandated time and half back pay.

    

Pretty Sad Really

Dodo

    In an intellect that emerged from primordial wildernes as a survival tool that raises and makes answers to questions when it's not making things like battle tanks, silk stockings and wooden spoons, you might notice that hope finds patience, toys with tolerance before reverting to lumpen resignation. 

   "Learning that everything has a name transforms how the mind carves up reality, shifting an experience of a continuous, flowing background into distinct, labeled objects and categories"

    "While pre-linguistic minds can still grasp basic numerical and social concepts, acquiring a formal language dramatically expands abstract reasoning, complex planning, and the ability to share knowledge across generations"

    Gone are honor and glory, moments of bliss and explosions of consciousness that reduce being to the brilliance of a shooting star. Instead of basking in the glitter, we try to make it real by learning how to write so as to give ourselves over to an eternity that can be reproduced.

The enablers of Tyranny

Book

     An established pattern in our land places a premium on correct answers. A point comes when those correct answers become insecure. Let me just say that answers, a preoccupation that we people have chosen to call intellect, are written into history by politics not choice. And yes, there's a high chance you'll disagree on the definition of the symbol politics. And yes, there's a high chance you'll disagree on the statement; "The written world is an inadequate means of both communication and record keeping."

   "Aught is better than naught!" Or "owt better'n nowt." Then consider the expression or idiom: "Better aught than naught." 

    Granted aught and naught are archaic words. The first records suggest they go back to the 12 Century.  Allow yourself to understand that both words are still in use. Of the two statements, the second one, "better aught than naught," is recorded as the original and therefore correct version. This of course is nonsense in human speak but is sensible in number speak where "E=MC squared" is not "MC squared = E."

   The missing element between these two phrases, is not which one of them came first, it's the nuance, tone and the more visual signals that are entirely context related. Oh sure, Wittgenstein's language game has been well absorbed into the fabric of LLM training. If you want to know how, the machine records impressions of this or that human through the history of machine/human interactions. The context of a language exchange between machine and a particular person is build around past interactions and are added to the machines capacity to predict by searching through probabilities unique to the recorded interactions between machine and a particular human.

    The machine will have a record of your name, your age, your marital status and on it goes. A good chance the machine will have a record of you politics, your likes, your religion, what you find funny... From these records it will have a model of you from which it can predict likely interests, behaviors etc. It can do all these things as it quietly kicks the Turin Test in the nuts.

   The reason to give consideration to a machine's access to spoken language while converting written language into mathematically commodifiable number symbols has much to do with what, over the past five thousand years, the Written word has already done to our species.

    And what might that be?

    Written language is a consort of Agriculture, they are the original sins, together they have enabled the tyranny of commodity. Agriculture destroyed the natural world, written language began the process of destroying humanity. Spoken language, opposable thumbs and sublime sunsets are about all we have left of our humanity.