A philosopher finds his peace

A former student just back from Germany sends along proof-positive that pessimistic philosophers eventually get what they yearn for.

Old Artur's not wrestling with the Will anymore. Thanks, Rudy!

Kant to Schopenhauer

O 98-114, PW 89-101


1. What did the Romantics emphasize? What was their view of rationalism and empiricism?

2. How did Herder describe Germany's cultural heritage?  What did Goethe's "Faust" sell his soul for?

3. What did Immanuel Kant "synthesize" (i.e., what philosophies and what kinds of statements?)? Where did he live? What did he do every day (that his neighbors noticed)? Who was his favorite French author? Who "awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers"? (And what does that mean?)

4. What are Kantian "categories"? Appearance and reality correspond to what "worlds"? Which did Kant say was knowable? How? What did he say was unknowable?

5. What did Kant find awesome? How did he answer ethical questions (such as whether it's ever acceptable to tell a lie)? 

6. Who said there's no such thing as the thing-in-itself? Who said architecture is frozen music? Who loved dogs and introduced Kant to the French?

7.Who said "the real is the rational & the rational is real," also denied the existence of unknowable things in themselves, and said everything is intricately related (like a jigsaw, or a giant organism)?

8. What historical process did Hegel claim connects spirit, nature, and mind? What are its parts? When does it end? 

9. According to Hegel, what's another term for "Time-Spirit"? What is history? What's the creative source of reality?

10. What blind, irrational force did Schopenhauer, "starting from Kant," say is the "thing-in-itself" and the source of evil? How did he think wisdom could be achieved?

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11. Kant was originally a follower of who?

12. Kant proposed to limit what, to make room for what? What "great ideas" did he hope to place beyond the reach of science?

13. What, according to Kant, do we do to the objects of our experience, with the result that we don't have to infer or prove the existence of an external world? (TIP: This is a useful mnemonic, worth remembering.) To whom was this a direct response?

14. How did Kant reconceive Descartes' conception of self, or "thinking thing"?

15. How did Kant say we demonstrate our freedom? When are we unfree?

16. Why did Kant think faith in an unproven God a "rational postulate" (though not knowledge)?

17. Who did Hegel call "world history on horseback"? What did he consider philosophy's final goal?

18. What was Hegel's term for what he considered the all-enveloping "cosmic soul" that includes us as part of all nature and history? What did he see as its most important implication?

19. What Kantian thesis about knowledge and consciousness did Hegel reject? What Aristotelian thesis did he accept? What does this imply about the self? What "sensibility" did he embrace?

20. What was Hegel saying about philosophy when he spoke of the "Owl of Minerva"?

21. What kind of hero were the young Romantics looking for? Who did they find? What did their hero most despise in Hegel's philosophy?

22. How did Schopenhauer adapt Kant's philosophy to his own? What was his view of the point or purpose of existence? What did he share with the Buddhists? How did he think we could break free of the controlling and all-consuming Will?

happy rats

Rats are happier when they've been habituated to the "positive stress" of exercise*: a lesson for laggards and misanthropes (and devotees of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche).

New research has undermined the simplistic view of serotonin as the “happy” brain chemical... rats taught to feel helpless and anxious, by being exposed to a laboratory stressor, showed increased serotonin activity in their brains. But rats that had run for several weeks before being stressed showed less serotonin activity and were less anxious and helpless despite the stress.

Anxiety in rodents and people has been linked with excessive oxidative stress, which can lead to cell death, including in the brain. Moderate exercise, though, appears to dampen the effects of oxidative stress... rats that had exercised were relatively nonchalant under stress. They didn’t run for dark corners and hide, like the unexercised rats. They insouciantly explored.

*This goes for moderate walker-rats, too, not just gym rats. The best exploring is pedestrian.

Question everything

Turned out to be George Carlin Day in Happiness 101, we didn't even get around to the Experience Machine. But that's ok, I think we're all sold on reality-- its necessity, not necessarily its superiority-- already.

George was too, and in his own words (and by the testimony of friends like Tony Hendra) he liked people... to a point. Not an unreasonable attitude at all. And wasn't George a (more-or-less) happy pessimist? A much better one than Schopenhauer, in fact, because he was (deliberately) funny.

So here's one more Carlin clip, the one I alluded to in class. He's not going for laughs here, this is about our future. He was a comedian with a conscience, and these are among his last public words. Characteristically profane, but from a distinctively humane source.

rats

Poor old Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Scrooge and Sourpuss, victim of his own wan and withering emotions. At least Nietzsche eventually got over the petulant, purposeless rage against fate that kept his former hero sunk in a lifetime of pessimism, isolation, and despair. But from the vantage of mellow Jamesian meliorism, both resembled rodents.

"The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche... though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth. The sallies of the two German authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats."

But Schopenhauer was not a total scrooge, at least towards his beloved little poodles (his favorite was "Atman") and one or two other human beings. That's why Alain de Botton chose him to exemplify "consolation for a broken heart."

His trouble was that he never learned to enjoy the passage of time. Might as well enjoy the ride, Artie. Give us a smile. "The present may be compared to a small dark cloud which the wind drives over the sunny plain," sure. But why not compare it to sunshine breaking through clouds? Sometimes it's like that, too.

JT does agree, though: time isn't really real, "nothingness itself is therefore the only objective element in time." So... embrace your subjectivity. Arguably, that's exactly what Schopenhauer did. His World as Will and Idea was an extrusion from the recesses of his subjective melancholy, and it gave him some considerable satisfaction to extrude it.

Schopenhauer deserves an award for the Most Howling Non-Sequitur by a supposedly-brilliant mind. "The hours pass the quicker the more agreeably they are spent, and the slower the more painfully they are spent... We become conscious of time when we are bored, not when we are diverted. [This proves] that our existence is most happy when we perceive it least, from which it follows that it would be better not to have it."

He's not wrong, though, to note that unremediated evil and suffering "can never be annulled, and consequently can never be balanced." There's no remedy for past suffering. As in bodily health, we must be pro-active. Practice preventive medicine, and pursue "wellness." Still, to call this world-- or even Schopenhauer's 19th century-- "the worst of all possible worlds," is to betray a dearth of imagination.

I don't disagree either, though, with his pronouncement that stoical equanimity too easily collapses into cynical renunciation.

The bit about how disgusted unhappy people are made by the spectacle of "one whom they imagine happy" scores no points against happy people.

Arthur would have been happy to greet the apocalypse, and would have been first in line for 2012. Of course Pompeii, the Lisbon earthquake, et al barely scratched the surface of possible cataclysm. He wishes.

His most sympathetic human views centered on art, which he actually said helps us "transcend egotistical interests and empathize with universal emotions."

Metaphysician, heal thyself.

Scrooge

"There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.” Mark Twain

Talking about the old pessimist Schopenhauer today-- he was a young pessimist once, too-- I mused that he'd lived to a relatively ripe old age for someone so sure that life was a mistake and a burden. (In fact, he made it to just 72. His disposition made him look at least that old, in photographs, long before his eventual expiration date.)

Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Schopenhauer, too? He does seem to have enjoyed his misery and misogyny and misanthropy, and even to have lived for it. He could've checked out early. Life: love it or leave it. Isn't that the existentialist/pessimist credo? In fact, he rejected suicide on philosophical grounds even though personal events brought it close to home.

"His father killed himself in 1805. [That might explain some things, eh?] However, he insists that suicide is a cowardly act... we do not really [on his metaphysical view] will but are willed by an unconscious agency over which we have no power. The problem with suicide, then, is that it maintains the illusion of willfulness. For Schopenhauer, the only permissible suicide is the self-starvation of the ascetic..." But why is even that "permissible," if we're all under the sway of a voracious and implacable Will, endlessly striving for no purpose larger than its own blind and pointless continuance?

The young Schopenhauer, btw, had not only been a romantic figure for the trendy young pessimists who made him their paragon; he was himself disappointed in love. Matthieu Ricard's statement seems tailor-made for our philosopher: "We can respond to heartbreaks by trying to forget them, distracting ourselves, moving away, going on a trip, and so on, but these are merely plaster casts on a wooden leg." Schopenhauer's cast was metaphysical. Did it assuage his heartbreak? Doubtful.

For the record: "he was found dead sitting in his chair on 21 September 1860." He hadn't missed any meals. Simon Critchley

"Friend Hegel"

In my bygone undergraduate years in the seventies I had a teacher who spoke familiarly of "friend Hegel," and my pals and I convened our little Friday afternoon beer-and-conviviality club under the banner of what we pretentiously called "The Hegel Society." (Maybe we meant to emulate the St. Louis Hegelians, I forget.) That was a club destined for dissolution, when one of our group attempted a demonstration of his free will by bashing himself with a mug of beer. In any case, I never really cottoned to Hegelian philosophy – especially after discovering William James’s send-up in "Some Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide." There James notes a parade of contradictory candidates for Hegelian reconciliation and rational synthesis, such as "God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other contrasts... "

Tongue deeply lodged in cheek, James then proceeds to report a series of his own "deep" musings allegedly recorded while under the influence of Hegel and laughing gas, including:

What's mistake but a kind of take?
What's nausea but a kind of -usea?
Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of criticism --
How criticise without something to criticise?
Agreement -- disagreement!!
Emotion -- motion!!!!
By God, how that hurts! By God, how it doesn't hurt!
Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure on sense!

(Michael Pollan undertakes a similar "experiment" in Botany of Desire, reading The Selfish Gene while smoking marijuana. His results were more enlightening.) But James finally tips his hand, venting a fiercely anti-Hegelian temperament:

the identification of contradictories, so far from being the self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.

And there my own negative appraisal of Hegel rested for a long time, until eventually I came across an essay a couple of years back fetchingly titled (in coincident echo of my old prof) "My New Friend Hegel," by Michael Prowse:

"To the degree that we are thinking beings, Hegel says, we have to consider ourselves as part of a larger whole and not as neatly individuated। He calls this mental whole Geist, or Spirit, and tries to work out the rules by which it develops through time... Hegel didn't regard Geist as something that stands apart from, or above, human individuals. He saw it rather as the forms of thought that are realised in human minds... What Hegel does better than most philosophers is explain how individuals are linked together and why it is important to commit oneself to the pursuit of the general or common good."

This gloss anticipates the criticisms of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, two virulently anti-Hegelian pessimists whose philosophies were contemptuous of communitarian values and the public interest. Arthur Schopenhauer asserted the ubiquity of blind, striving, impersonal, purposeless Will. Soren Kierkegaard affirmed the propriety of "leaps of faith." The harm done in each case, I believe, is to reinforce the irrationalist impulses of modern life; and to extend to them an unearned respectability. We must not believe "because it is absurd"... and must not embrace despair until we’ve really given meliorism a fair shot.