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."

Meta-narrative Movement

Autumn Clematis

Postmodern thinking would suggest that controlling the language used to interpret reality controls the narrative that supports this or that idea of reality. The Goebbels's quote "We shall go down in history as either the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals," is unsourced, and because of that it's suspect. The quote suggests Goebbels was aware of how the narratives the Nazi Party propagated would be judged. But is this unsourced quote something Goebbels actually said? Is it something he actually believed. Or is it a something the author of the quote, when all the information and motivations supporting the author's understanding had found their way into this interpretation of the Goebbels meta-narrative chose to promote as something Goebbels's might have said? Inevitably it's accurate to question the extent to which Goebbels deserves the word meta-narrative all to himself, instead of a more straightforward "The Goebbels Story." It's also probably accurate to suggest that in our current climate the environment is rich with attempts to modify the meta-narrative, there are so many fine examples of attempts to rewrite or re-inform us people. To this end the word democrat is being used as a synonym for the words bad, evil, insane, libtard and dangerous snowflake. But don't hold back, Roget's has some interesting and equally dehumanizing additions for the word republican conjoined with the word patriot. To my mind, the most entertaining of these synonyms is Švejk-like, after Hašek's character, that congenital idiot, The Good Soldier Švejk. Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech, in 1923 he died at the age of 39 of heart disease. His unfinished book on the cretinous nature of authority figures, has been translated into at least 60 languages. Hašek has been called a Satirical Realist, and he's been described as having a passion for writing. He was someone who may well have approved of the Poet Charles Bukowski's epitaph "Don't Try." Bukowski's point was that authenticity before the muddle of pretension was the honorable way to express story and emotion rather than reduce emotion and story to a product. So what is satire? Merriam Webster suggests: trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly. Oxford English suggests: The use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics.  Easy to suggest in this day and age of us against him that whoever said "We shall go down in history as either the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals," already begins to sound like a satirist.  

Postmodernism through Ironic Detachment to Post Irony

 

Tie Dye

Post Irony can be defined as a "state in which earnest and ironic interests become muddled." The earnests of our world yearn for an intense and all consuming conviction as opposed to what some might call the skepticism of the ironically detached. Me, as a soul delighted by the Postmodernist Perspective, an irony rich environment, it would be easy enough for you to suggest that I struggle with Ironic Detachment. It's not a disease, it's a tone, the elements of which include the following: an appreciation of bombast which enables me to think I'm sophisticated. A dry and some might say cynical perspective which I have in spades. I prefer to avoid the responsibility of a moral judgement because I'm pretty sure I'd just be making it up to suit my interest, or, being a boy, to get laid. Luckily I enjoy the authenticity and passion of the dedicated existentialist, Camus' absurd is good enough for me, call me Jaroslav Hašek's congenital idiot, The Good Soldier Švejk. But being an old fart I'd prefer the title "An Ironically Detached Postmodernist." There again, if I wanted to be authentic within my peer group and passionately engaged, believe me, I'd be food for those new evangelists the Conflict Entrepreneurs, you know who they are, they're the ones who monetize Post Irony and talk about "our" savior as they point to a passing star while using flash fiction bombast and the invented convictions of the earnest to feed their own bank accounts.

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.