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."

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.