Late stage Irony Wallace and Schopenhauer

Blue Convolvulus or Bindweed

 OK lets agree that in his understanding of Post Irony, David Foster Wallace was of the opinion that in it's maturing phase postmodernism had turned irony into an end in itself, it had become a cynicism (in the modern sense of cynicism not the Diogenes of Synope's meaning) a cynicism masquerading as irony and as such it had sort of got stuck with an assumption that authenticity, truth and commitment where just very uncool. He argued that by the 1980's it had got to the point where any suggestion of authenticity, truth or commitment received a sneer, a rolled eye, a cruel laugh and all those classic back row reactions which some of us took solace from and still do. Baxter and I do have to say that while we both love this Post Irony stuff, and we are inclined toward the idea that Wallace's call for new and positive "guiding narratives for ourselves and our communities even while remaining mindful that any narrative is not altogether true or universal" is a sad marriage between abject snowflakeism and Starbucks didgeridoo-libtardism. However Baxter and I are right there when it comes to a general desire to engage with a narrative that avoids elitism, sentimentality, whimpering and whingeing. There's a suggestion that Our new Comrade David Wallace's critique of a white nationalist narrative would include the following wonderful words, "unchecked, self-aggrandizing fanaticism - dangerous attachment masquerading as an "enlarging" cause but is, in fact, a narrow, sentimental, and ultimately "pathetic" form of bondage to a chosen self-image." How beautiful, not at all ironic, but let's just say if you were a believer in white nationalism it might be deemed cynicism. Oh that he had lived to conjure a string of pearls for a critique of Christian White Nationalism. Our other friend Arthur Schopenhauer, if you asked him to give thought to a new and positive guiding narrative he would have laughed, or he might have laughed, more likely he'd have directed one of his Poodles to bite you in the leg, because Arthur Schopenhauer was anti-narrative philosopher. He didn't look at the world and ask: How can I be happy? Nirvana for him was Nothingness, an acceptance of the vanity of existence, understanding that the will was restless and born to suffer, no narrative or belief could stop that, so the rational answer to the human condition was stop dreaming and stop believing. Safe to say Schopenhauer had little faith in an objective love, and David Wallace couldn't find one.

Submission to Life and Happy Endings

Clematis Paniculata

We've had a rather feeble shot at saying hello to George Luis Borges. Within the context of a temporal reality, today I look up at him as an early Postmodernist with Post Ironic tendencies and Magical Realist leanings.  Baxter and I loath those sort of categories, but to make ourselves sound important we still use them. Meanwhile, off and on, I've sat on Borges foot stool since the post office days, a good fifty years ago, and I still have a slight grudge against Tolkien, Frank Herbert and perhaps JG Ballard for distracting me. But when you get your books from second hand shops in a welsh city that boasts a university and hard drinking Welsh Nationalist Poets, what do you expect, you can't pick and choose! Either way, George Luis Borges had respect for our man Arthur Schopenhauer, for both his pessimism and his metaphysics. He embraced Schopenhauer's understanding that can be précised this way:  "The material world is an invention of creative imagination." You have to love that simple summary of an exceedingly complex set of ideas. Borges own understandings included the suggestion "metaphysics is fiction," and indeed his blurring of the real with fantasy is beautifully ironic. I know, Baxter is also wondering whether he exists and if so why hasn't the Spleen been given a kinder, more generous personality. As for James Joyce, Borges, like so many, Borges went love hate on him. He loved Joyce's blurring of dream and waking and he hated Joyce's lack of respect and somewhat cavalier attitude for those of his readers who have struggled to battle through the ridiculously long sentences at the end of Ulysses. Just to be sure on our shared definition of ironic. In 1502 it meant: by which a man sayeth one thing and giveth to understand the contrary. These days in the world of Giant Electricity Guzzling Language Modes, Irony means: a contradiction between what appears to be true and what is actually true, or between what is said and what is truly meant. It's easy to forget that all of Joyce's Ulysses happened on one day, meanwhile all of Homer's Ulysses was a ten year odyssey. And here I think my point would be Joyce's Penelope, Mrs Molly Bloom, definitely had a large number of admirers, including a possible lesbian attachment, as well as an abandoned singing careers, and on that one day, the 16th of June 1904 while her husband Leopold was having a Merry time out with menfolk and barmaids, Molly had joined with her very good looking lover, Blazes Boylan. And there she was at the end of Joyce's Ulysses, lying in bed with her husband Leopold, wandering about the meaning of it all and not finding a great deal of hope. Homer's Penelope, in most accounts, not all, had remained faithful during her husband's ten year absence, had done rather well with the family business, and was happy to see Ulysses back even if he had changed a bit and may have been suffering from post traumatic stress and a sort of narcissistic paranoia. Sadly for Molly, and in my view a tad cowardly of him, Joyce had given Molly the responsibility for the final word of his very long Ulysses. That word was "Yes." It was the word Molly had used in her answer to Leopold when he plighted his troth on a day out to a fishing village north of Dublin, many years before. Joyce thought Molly's "Yes" was a female word, whether good or bad, Molly accepted her lot, submitted to it, her "Yes" was an affirmation of her life and her place in the world. It was happy word, a happy ending.  Born in Dublin James Joyce died in 1941 in Switzerland, he was called a modernist. 

The Plain or Gathering Place of Ideal Forms

Gray Tree Frog

On this first day of a possible rapture, Baxter has volunteered a word of two about Plato and chariots. It begins with a parable, allegory, haggadah, whatever you want to call it, this one is about people, gods and ideal forms. And yes, to give this particular exemplum from Plato a degree of juj I have run rather loose with the details while retaining the basic distinctions Plato makes between men and gods, as well as his approach to what knowledge is, where it is, and how we people get our fingers on it. We all, men and gods, start out the same. Dumb as bricks yet beady eyed and blinking in the light surrounded by Ideal Forms of everything there is. And lo as we become less and less adorable and more and more obnoxious we begin to outstay our welcome, so the power from beyond, the origin of all, what Schopenhauer might have called the Blind Irrational Universal Will that exists outside of space and time, what Plato thought of as a non-physical eternal realm, this power from beyond produces chariots to send us on our way. Not sure whether you get a weeks training, whether there's any classroom work, or whether horse management and chariot driving literacy is assumed. What does happen is that some of us are more adept at chariot driving than others, some of us have well matched horses who get along with each other. But some of us have no idea what we're doing, we're a little nervous of horses, their teeth and their hooves, we're given ill-matched horses who have little respect for each other. And off across the plain we go to explore the host of perfect forms, absorb every ounce of perfect knowledge that's been laid out on display for our benefit. Lucky for you if your chariot gets manageable horses, you can take your time, explore, maybe pause get a closer a look at the ideal form of feminine beauty, the perfect carpenter, perfect table, an interior designer or an ideal lemon tree. But if your horses are Ill-matched and uncontrollable, charging around like mental patients, good chance you'll hide in the bowels of your assigned chariot waiting for it to be over. In time the more confident charioteers cheer on their steeds and up they go toward the clouds where they become gods. It's like a rapture. Sadly the less confident charioteers get flung around, this way and that until they get tossed carriage-less out of the Realm of Ideal Forms, they fall to earth were they wake up in a birth canal, find themselves kicking and screaming as they enter the world as mortals. It sucks even worse, because as a new born mortal even though you had your chance to fully grasp and understand the totality of knowledge you remember nothing. You're an empty bucket that leaks. For us mortals, knowledge will never be learned, if we're lucky, and there's a slim chance, with a little help from Plato telling us how to think properly we might remember something from our visit to the Plain of Ideal Forms. The point to keep a hold of, whether you call it Will or Eternal Realm, for both Plato and Schopenhauer this whatever it is lies outside us. For Kant, the plain of the ideal forms is inside us. The European Enlightenment strove for the idea that for us consciousness was our individualized special place, it was time for us to master ourselves, become the self overcoming Übermensch. Now and then a wacko like Schopenhauer popped up, occasionally physicists in their dotage made the odd sinister suggestion about a universal consciousness. The well-off, god bless them, in the West, the comfortable, those subject to aggressive tutelage and the threat of career, while struggling with third generation wealth, feeling overwhelmed and disenchanted by The Enlightenment looked to the East for solace from a wider perspective on the subject of being alive. We wanted cold baths and the whip in the drive to define our frightfully special me.

Will and the Ideal Forms for Schopenhauer

Waiting for Rain

The great sadness in life, and Baxter is trying to be brave, is that you can't talk about Kant or Schopenhauer or any of Kant's disciples, without mentioning Plato's metaphysics. When I was a callow youth, back when The Spleen was a cheerful, a happy go-lucky and confident atheist and when Baxter was no more than a distant glint in an abdominal aorta's eye, the word metaphysics was something Doctor Faustus used to pick up chicks who he could never marry because marriage was apparently a solemn Christian rite and Mephistopheles didn't approve of solemn institutions. Soon enough I realized that a majority meaning for the word metaphysics had less to do with the physical and legal conjoining of boys and girls and more to do with an understanding of the origin of the physical world. Certainly Plato wasn't the first to venture into the role of educating the youth and anyone else who would listen, but it was his metaphysics that had a profound influence on the western world. Even Foucault had to join the other postmodernists and reckon with Plato. And there's a chance the brothers and sister of Post Irony might one day ask a large language model to explain Plato's building blocks of reality, his Ideal Forms, before the data banks are subsumed by passionate and fashionable warbling of a Post Irony Aesthetic, a mid twenty first century Punk, a reincarnation of Siouxsie and the Banshees, what fun, and mindbogglingly First World, where's Pontius Pilate when you need him, but I have promised Baxter we'll try to live long enough to see it. Anyway! What on this good earth is an Ideal Form and why didn't Schopenhauer agree with Kant on what Plato said about Ideal Forms? It's a massive question that's put the shakes into Baxter who's already been accused of anti-antisemitism by the Spleen for saying that Ivan gave him the heebie-jeebies. Plato had decided that everything that happens in our brains was subject to our flawed perceptions and as a result was fundamentally imperfect. His Ideal Forms were the perfect, nonphysical archetypes of everything that exists. For Plato these perfect, non physical Archetypes existed outside our brains, they were in the universe, not in our minds. Kant decided that Plato had made an error, Kant argued that these perfect non physical archetypes were not in the universe they were in our brains. Schopenhauer dismissed Kant's idea that Ideal Forms were in our brains. He dismissed Kant's idea that Ideal forms were a priori structures of knowledge which our superior and unique cognitive abilities allowed us to access. Instead Schopenhauer insisted that of course ideal forms existed outside our brains, he rather denigrated Kant's positive attitude to cognitive ability, and Schopenhauer was determined that the timeless essence of all things were a manifestation of will, or more accurately Ideal Forms were a first level manifestation of will. For Schopenhauer, what he meant by Will was a metaphysical primal energy that exists outside of time, space and causality. Hold on, didn't Plato have his own thoughts on primal energy. Yes, I think he did, sort of. Plato put it together in a parable about the difference between the obedient horses that drew chariots for the Gods and the unruly horses that drew the chariots for men. Either way Baxter's yawning and we have a life to live.  

Understandings of Myth and Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer. Portrait by Johann Schäfer 1859

Conway's 2017 approach to a myth of Crowd Size now feels like a hundred years ago, but in another way something as intense as the origin of Christianity, or even the origin of the word Zoroaster, instead of Zarathustra, is rife with alternative possibilities, or alternative facts. Here I'm happy to argue that years and years ago, without myth we people would have failed, we'd have been canned food for the Saber Tooth Tiger, it's just that the Conway version of myth making remains fundamentally pathetic, a tragic misunderstanding of venerable and ancient myth making protocols. To dwell a while longer with myth, I always thought our generation of thinking emerged from the understandings drilled into us and our teachers by the influential Immanuel Kant. Kant enjoyed the idea that the enlightenment was a chance for us people to finish our apprenticeship, he saw our chance to "emerge from a self-incurred tutelage." His view of myth was: because of it, we people remained in a sort of bondage. At the same time, for the sake of his Lutheran students, he added the suggestion that God was mostly about morality, he went on to suggest that the pursuit of moral behavior within a society was an entirely reasonable search by reasonable creatures. Indeed that pursuit of morality was a Categorical Imperative about which we could do nothing, we just couldn't help ourselves but want to be nice, it was a Universal law in a Kingdom of Ends - we're talking The Metaphysics of Morals published 1797. Mind you Kant wasn't totally averse to mystery. Uniquely blessed as he thought we were  by reason, he nonetheless reckoned we remained cave dwellers who could never fully grasp everything. Yet Kant had a reverence for the sets of emotions assigned to the word Awe and the word Beauty. He knew not why the starry night evinced both awe and a reverence for the beautiful in him and yet it did. It may have been a union of Georges Sorel's writing on the power of myth and Arthur Schopenhauer's understanding of myth and religion that opened a reverential door for me, or at least struck me with a liking. Sadly this side of the Appalachians, the more delicate English speakers are made nervous by something as harmless as the Frankfurt School's thoroughly reasonable, almost an embodiment of reason, collection of suggests that have been given the two words Critical Theory. This, shall we call it a gang land intolerance, does rather taint an environment increasingly dominated by the current iteration of state employed Brown Shirts, who presumably are beneficiaries of the very latest managerial Approach to the opportunities of Purity through Privatized Internment Camps. So instead of considering the role of myth in Sorel's Revolutionary Syndicalist views, his oligarchy of syndicates which for Sorel was to benefit the working man not the Indolent Capitalist, it's probably best all round if I wax more than somewhat on the Poodle loving and delightfully bad tempered Schopenhauer's understanding of myth. For those who may be temporarily disabled by a Post Irony Condition, yes, Schopenhauer's Poodles were a dog breed that originated in Germany, not, as some still believe, France. And for goodness sake, look at Arthur's face, you can sort of see him leading his people into the wilderness. Rest assured our guide Schopenhauer did indeed find humanity a constant source of "vexation and disappointment."

Schopenhauer's Hedgehogs

Sweet Annie and her Ladybird

Before talking about his hedgehogs I wanted to quote from a biography of Arthur Schopenhauer by a professor of philosophy and religion at Wisconsin University. He reproduces a letter addressed to a young Schopenhauer from his mother, who was apparently "vivacious and sociable." The letter to her son contained a character assessment: "You (Arthur) are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people." Yes indeed, no wonder I share Arthur's understanding of myth. Anyway, it was a cold winter's day in the wealthy and free-wheeling Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth when a "prickle" of hedgehogs, sometimes called an "array" or a "kribbeln," pronounced kri-ben, of hedgehogs, decided that instead of freezing to death they'd risk their reputations and cuddle together for warmth. But the closer they tried to get to each other the crueler their prickles began to feel. So they moved apart and of course the further they moved apart the crueler the freeze began to feel, a circumstance that persuaded them to move closer to each other. Being practitioners of a Zoroastrian sense of wisdom they'd long ago grasped that Reflection and Choice was the Hedge-Dweller Way, not accident, yellow faced lies or brute force. There was no hawking and spitting, no yelling on television, no raging podcasts desperate for the subsistence of subscriptions and likes, instead they calmly determined a compromise distance between the discomfort of prickles and the comfort of warmth. Is this about Ivan? I hear the call. Sort of, it was a parable from Schopenhauer about us people in which he described the "unbearable burden" of social situations along with that complement of the "vivacious and social" that such situations encourage. Schopenhauer went on to argue that a rich inner world makes us people much less dependent on the outer world to provide entertainment and validation. Arthur was born in February 22, 1788.  He was very much a Pisces and like all fish he was prone to escapism. He was 72 when he died a hundred and sixty five years ago.

Planck, Kant and Schopenhauer on Mind

White Snakeroot

The issue Max Planck raised with his 1944 sentence - This mind is the matrix of all matter - remains somewhere in an answer to the question: what does Max mean by mind? It seems he gives this mind intelligence, sees in it a source of design, order and pattern. He claims this mind is a consciousness that was the reality from which all physical matter arose. And he argued that matter as we understand it is not a solid, rather it was a manifestation of Mind, Spirit, Will or Consciousness and continues to be so. If you think of our mind through Immanuel Kant's teetotaler eyes you'll find an understanding of a Mind, Spirit, Will or Consciousness that has structures which enable us to look around, feel stuff and otherwise enjoy perception. However our mind doesn't allow us to know reality, instead our mind allows us to transcend reality sufficient to make reality intelligible. The mind, Max chose to believe was behind the matrix of all matter, could touch those places Kant claimed our mind could only reach through transcendence or intelligent guesses. The mind behind the Matrix of Matter that Max talked about, knew reality, indeed it forged reality, it was part of reality. And to Max's own mind, whatever it was the Mind behind the Matrix thought it was doing, it wasn't Schopenhauer's blind irrational metaphysical Mind, Spirit, Will or Consciousness that thrived on endless suffering. Oh no! It was intelligent, it had a plan that was fair, balanced, reasonable and it was comforting so we could all relax and take less notice of Schopenhauer's suggestion that the best we could do was wave to each other while keeping a polite distance from each other. 

Idealism or Making Stuff Up

I wandered lonely as a cloud when all at once another host of Golden Wingstem

Cato the Elder, who was a Roman Senator and author of a book on Farming, disliked the Greeks. He thought them the equivalent of an ill-disciplined bunch of wishy-washy hippies. Cato the Younger, who was Cato the Elders great-grandson, another Roman  senator, following the defeat of Pompey the Great at the final battle of the Roman Civil War in 44 BC, the Battle of Pharsalia in Northern Greece, killed himself rather than submit to that tyrant and odious human being Julius Caesar. The Poet Lucan in his epic about the Battle of Pharsalia, gave us a line that has a sort of eternal relevance: "The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause was pleasing to Cato." As inevitably happens, even two thousand years later, the losers often look to Lucan's line for solace. Here in the USA the Confederate States, following the events at the Court House in Appomattox in 1865 used Lucan's line to reassure themselves that their defeat by the Union was a loss of liberty, certainly not a moral failing. In my view, and I am biased, the Confederate States, being a little desperate, were grasping, frightfully Anglo-Saxon, loose minded, were as bad as podcsters and bloggers in their quest to discover comfort in Lucan's sentence. So what does Max Planck mean when he claims: "There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter." In my view, assuming the force behind the existence of matter is a conscious and intelligent mind is an equally grasping assumption. But I at least can forgive Planck his idealism. He made this remark in Italy in 1944. The Italians had surrendered, the German army was holding on to the north of Italy and in the middle of it all Plank was attending a conference. Meanwhile Planck's home had been bombed, his son had been brutally killed for the role the boy had had in an assassination attempt on the Tyrant  Adolf Hitler, and Planck, who'd devoted his life to physics, was endeavoring to find relevance in a world that made less and less sense. Myself, I draw comfort from the misery of Arthur Schopenhauer, who died in 1860 and was much smitten by Buddhism. In Arthur's book The World of Will and Representation he explored the idea of a world driven by a Blind and Irrational Metaphysical Will that thrived on Endless Suffering. It's good stuff, the Ancient Greeks would have loved it