Schopenhauer as an inspiration to us all.

Late Blooming Chicory

What does "objective love" mean? If your time here on earth was at any time informed by Arthur Schopenhauer you'd have heard that human emotions are a manifestation of the central and never ending, totally irrational, pretty much random, restless driving force that underlies all of reality. Arthur called this force Will.  Here manifestation means to make tangible and all of reality means everything in the universe. If the Will, for Arthur, is the underlying force, the reality, then the  world as an Appearance of the Will, or the world as a Representation of the Will, is the universe of everything that we experience through our senses which are then parsed by our collection of irrational and wholly unreliable emotions.  Arthur would have placed religion in the category of Representation, it was an Appearance, a manifestation of the Will as interpreted by our fickle, capricious, inconstant emotions which for Arthur was essentially a mechanism of suffering. To reach for the title of a pamphlet Lenin wrote about his own ambitions, his classically human desire to rule the world was summarized thus: "What is to be done?" Unlike Lenin, Schopenhauer had options rather than a series of scientifically supported solutions to the permanence and inevitability of interminable suffering. Arthur gave us people three basic drives which in people are internal tensions that lurk and become urgent needs which are sometimes thought of as motivational forces which compel us to satisfy needs that include biological drives, psychological drives and social drives, and here worth remembering that for Arthur, reality as interpreted by our emotions, was just one nightmare followed by another. Anyway, Arthur's first drive is Egoism, this most prevalent of drives is all about me and how much more important and deserving I am than anyone else. The second drive Arthur boldly decided is less common, or is supposed to be less common, it's what Arthur thinks of as malicious and negative. Of course some of us are prone to it especially around elections time, and yes it's when you wish that horrible things and terrible suffering would happen to other people. The third drive is compassion, an ability, nay a desire, to see beyond your own ego or maliciousness and recognize the inevitable suffering of others. Somewhere in this third drive, Arthur sensed the beginnings of an understanding that could lead to a shared and cooperating social concord. He might have been the Franklin Roosevelt of his day, instead he searched for an escape from the torment of emotions, their insistence on interpreting an irrational Will and as a result driving us, without our consent toward greater and greater follies. Arthur's solution was two fold. We could seek temporary relief in the aesthetics of this or that art form. The ballet, opera, getting bombed out of our skulls at an Eisteddfod or a Pink Floyd concert. Or we could find a permanent solution, a salvation in an asceticism that ignores all desires, dreams, human relationships, does away with the will-to-live and finds inner peace and harmony far away from the endless cycles of misery that would otherwise be cast upon us. So, let's not get too cute but objective love for Arthur might well have been surrendering to a callous and unloving reality by giving up on the will-to-live, not suicide, but Schopenhauer's Will, the irrational and restless force that is reality manifest through our emotions. And there we go, Borges "fiction as metaphysics." Joyce's submission to life through Molly Bloom's "Yes, Yes, Yes...." David Wallace's fruitless search for a comfortable narrative to replace the cynicism the poor chap perceived in late stage postmodern irony.