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.

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.

George Luis Borges' metaphysics, David Foster Wallace's Post Irony and Joyce's Ulysses

 

Purple Passion Flower Vine

If the back row can take this seriously and stop rolling their eyes I'll remind you that Borges took much of his metaphysics from Schopenhauer. A précis of Schopenhauer's work suggests: "The material world is an invention of creative imagination." Beware of what Schopenhauer understood by Will and by Creative Imagination, if you don't know, don't pretend you do. Borges's own thoughts on the subject included the idea that "Fiction is Metaphysics." Then, yesterday, we briefly played, ironically, with this understanding of metaphysics using the Modernist James Joyce's Ulysses, until overwhelmed by our own genius, Baxter and I sunk into a deep ennui with ill-temper that required lunch and a lie-down, which, according to Schopenhauer, genius is inevitably prone to. Our question this morning goes this way: "Does whatever comes after Postmodernism in the West, treat Plato and Immanuel Kant with respect, will these two giants of metaphysics become an example of really boring, soon forgotten and passionless or will they keep their place as tedious collectibles in one or other of the many Ivory Boarding Houses that does the laundry, serves breakfast, interesting lunches and dinner so no one has to think for themselves?" OK, as fans of Post Irony, what Baxter and I really need is for Kant to offer us an endless Critique of Postmodernism, then we might get a better understanding of this awful accusation that Postmodernism resulted in an all pervading cynicism where a buffoonish, snow-flaky understanding of authenticity defined as "genuine feelings and human connections" are impossible. Oh diddums, that's inches away from saying what we need is a good war.  Ask Baxter, try being on the receiving end of a radical Spleen's theosophical invective. Here we go, my good friend's still waiting for the Spleen's Jesus or maybe his Buddha to send him a manual. So let's just hold fast to the Chariot Theory of God and Men and assume an Almighty is an inevitable gathering place for Ideal Forms. Anyway, David Foster Wallace, was born in 1962, he was a depressed person, he threw coffee tables at his girlfriend, that sort of thing, he hanged himself in 2008 when he was 46. His critique of Postmodernism goes something like this: he reckoned the Postmodernism of the 1950's and 1960's used irony as a tool of rebellion. Good Lord! Beatniks, hippies, sex, drugs, rock and roll, pluralism, social safety nets, national health, unemployment benefits, mixed marriages, irony from the children of Franklin Roosevelt and Ernest Bevin. But on it went, in 1970's postmodernism, according to David Foster Wallace, who would have been a teenager at the time, became a fashionable cave, it was hip, it was super cool, people learned to love it, which resulted in a pervasive cynicism. David wanted a return to his ill-considered understanding of authenticity, he was a teacher looking for enthusiasm perhaps, maybe the back row really pissed him off and his solution to the cynicism he saw being promulgated by the cave of postmodernist irony was this new human condition referred to as Post Irony. The simpler answer might be to remain an existentialist by not parking the boat in a harbor of convictions that demands an enemy for an anchor. But there again we have the very ancient Chariot Theory of God and Men, a demand that experience precedes essence as well as an understanding of authenticity that suggests that like cats we people make our own meaning, so get over it. David Foster, who might not have grasped the fundamental argument of the postmodernists, which is that we're all better off without the wriggling around and lies meta-narratives require to maintain them, was born in Ithaca New York not Ithaca Ulysses' home Island or Dublin the birthplace of James Joyce's own metaphysics. Tomorrow an unironic introduction to hypocrisy. 

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.