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  

Planck's Constant

 

Giant Sumpweed???

In 1900, to solve a dilemma in physics Max Planck derived a bold solution through mathematics. The problem was in the relationship between a particle's energy and its frequency. Planck's calculation determined what he called the Quantum of Action. By Action he referred to energy moving along a path. Lend your mind to the image of waves on the screen of an oscilloscope, or the heart monitors in a coronary intensive care unit. The classic view of Action was that energy moving along a path could change in a smooth and continuous manner. Trouble was energy didn't seem to be moving along a path in a smooth and continuous manner, which suggested that energy might not be an infinitely divisible stream of whatever it was flowing into endless and mysterious wonder. Instead, Planck suggested, and this was radical, that energy and all other physical things comprised of tiny indivisible packets, that could be measured. Planck's Constant is his calculation of the size of the smallest possible unit or packet of energy or action in the Universe. Pretty, bloody bold, but lo, since 1900 Planck's Constant has been "measured with increasing precision." The question I'm hearing: "Does this have something to do with Ivan of the Left Artery or Baxter of the Abdominal Aorta?" Certainly not Ivan, he's a savage, he's a proponent of a flat-earth and he's in deep denial, so he has to grow up a bit, but Poor Baxter, encouraged by our Spleen and his cult members, is laboring under the illusion that despite claims by the laws of entropy which suggests that as energy dissipates and everything cools down time comes to an end producing the blessed release we all yearn for, Baxter, however, has been persuaded that when we die, he personally will be tried by God's Department of Justice and sentenced to what's laughingly referred to as "The Eternal Flames." The point about Max Planck, a blue-eyed German Idealist, the founder of quantum theory and a Lutheran, he's one of those fiendish physicists who has a number of very neat, and often incomprehensible suggestions about consciousness. At the end of his life, perhaps contemplating his legacy, he suggested in what to my mind was an off hand manner that Consciousness was the underlying matrix from which all matter came. He went on a bit, then some more and in so doing he sounded guilty of something, but we'll look at where that came from tomorrow when a rather special Clematis Paniculata achieves a slightly fuller bloom and after we've all been forced into a better understanding of what makes a young Mormon tick.