Philosophy

Schopenhauer has been on my radar for a while because like Donald Trump, Schopenhauer was a Kantian. To better understand how Trump will complete German idealism, one must first wrestle with this great thinker. While some philosophers content themselves with attempting to explain a single concept Schopenhauer decides he would rather explain everything from magnets to women ☕. Combining Kant’s distinction between idea of a thing vs thing in itself (in short, your idea of a car is not the car) and Platonic Idea (there is a single tree in a realm of forms which all trees in our world are representations of) he comes up with his own spin on things stating that the world presents itself to our experience as individuations of a single thing. That thing is Will. So hypothetically the process could go something like this Will encounters a subject and gets objectified into a Platonic idea. This platonic idea then encounters space and time where it is objectified once more into a perception, like a tree for example. So, what exactly is Will? Will is actually very similar to the Buddhist concept of desire. This is no coincidence as Schopenhauer calls the translation of the Vedas one of the greatest gifts of the 19th century. Will can be considered the universal principle that animates the universe. A blind insatiable striving. One outcome of this is that everything that wills, suffers. And since everything that exists is a manifestation of will it means that everything suffers. This plants Schopenhauer squarely in the school of pessimists. To Schopenhauer life can be broken into two experiences. One is either striving after something or bored (read depressed). Schopenhauer would say that the happiness we feel when accomplishing a goal isn’t actually happiness it is merely the cessation of suffering that was caused by the desire. Once this desire is gone a new one almost instantaneously takes its place. He also has some interesting ideas about art that somewhat resonated specifically that good art lifts a person out of their subject-ness for brief periods of time. It opens them up to look at the world more universally. For example, you hear a sad song and can join in not with particular sadness, but sadness at a universal level. He ends the book by talking about ethics ...

When I bought the Symposium, it came in a two pack with Phaedrus as its second. I was glad to find out that this book too revolved around pederasty(sarcasm). Essentially, Phaedrus runs into Socrates walking in the country after hearing a speech by Lysias on reasons why a boy should only lend his favors to a lover (older man) who is not in love with him. The text is lighthearted and has many jokes as Socrates then makes a better speech which agrees with Lysias impressing Phaedrus, but eventually reveals he believed Lysias’ speech to be pretty lame and he didn’t agree with his own. The book finishes with him giving a rebuttal speech and then he focuses on the art of rhetoric and the dangers and pitfalls that are in it. My favorite quote is in regard to (ironically) writing: ...

This was an experience, a probably literal fever dream. This book was never meant to be published as most of it is notes that he had written to himself. As such it isn’t the best most fun read, but it would probably be the most interesting journal you ever read. To me this book has its highs and lows. There are parts of this book that are fascinating, frustrating, redundant, contradictory, brilliant, and insightful. Being a preeminent science fiction writer, his strength is in his original ideas. There is no end to them. This book’s inspiration is based on a series of events that led him to the experience of singular mystical experience that was so life changing to him that he spends the next 8 years theorizing about its source and significance. He only stops theorizing about it because he died. As a reader it makes you want to experience something that significant just once in your life, but then again maybe not. Due to the type of mystical experience that was had, religious terms are best suited to try and describe it, but rest assured this religion of PKD is unlike any you’ve ever heard. I wrote down some of the ideas that stuck out to me, that I will continue to think about for a while. ...

This book was pretty interesting definitely full of things that make you think, but honestly, I feel like I understood less than half. Nietzsche’s writing style seems to take for granted that you understand what a lot of loaded words mean when he says them. So before i read this I did an overview of his ideas and also this being the second book of his i read it helped to make somethings be clearer, but many of his thoughts seem too internalized for me to understand at this stage. They are also so wrapped up in responses to various other ideas I don’t know much about, that they come off often as riddles. But it is funny in reading through a book like this where you read riddle after riddle, to then come across something that you’ve experienced in your own life and immediately get exactly what he is saying. “The reader ready for the writer”. That being said this book is very aggressive against pretty much every prior philosopher on the grounds that many of them without their own knowledge were propounding a sort of “slave morality”. The theme of slave vs master morality is really the central theme of this book. The idea of going beyond good and evil is to understand them not as opposites but different routes to the same thing. What is this thing? Nietzsche would say it is “the will to power”. I won’t go into exactly what he means by that but oversimplified it’d probably be better understood as “the will to self-expression/realization”. This book covers a lot of ground but has a sort of interlude in it which was my favorite part. It’s a sort of shower thoughts channel for Nietzsche, just full of great one-liners. So, I imagine this book will get better the more that the reader understands and has experienced. I look forward to re-reading at some point in the future.

Umph old baby Kierkegaard really stops you in your tracks and makes you look closely at a story you’ve heard a million times but points out that you’ve never actually understood it. As you can probably tell from the cover the story is of Abraham and Isaac. The main question of the book is what makes Abraham the “Father of Faith” and not a murderer? That question is so obvious but why has it never been talked about in any sermon other than the cursory “God said so?”. Kierkegaard wonders this as well. He spends the first section of the book elaborating on the insanity of request. He then describes his version of what faith is and why he’s never found anyone (including himself) that has it. Clearly, I can’t convey an accurate picture of what he was trying to explain in a couple lines but the gist of it (as I understood it) is that true faith requires a dual movement of the soul. The first movement is that of infinite resignation. That is to say releasing attachments that you have. The second movement is the infinite expectation by means of the absurd. This sort of reminds me of Schrodinger’s cat situation. In which one has given something up but at the same time has complete confidence that they will get it back, but that expectation never gets old or inhibits the resignation. Needless to say, it’s a complex idea which I am sure that I am bungling. The book then continues in a short investigation on the ethics of what Abraham did. In the epilogue of the book, he wraps up things nicely where he is talking about his belief that faith is “the highest passion of man” and that perhaps like love is an end to itself. Thus moving past faith, he thinks is part of the human tendency to always ask “what’s next?”. He illustrates this with this story at the very end of the book that has really stuck in my head: ...

So, Spinoza is an interesting guy. He was brought up Jewish but ended up coming up with his own philosophy of God which didn’t really agree with anyone that was around him at the time. This book wasn’t published during his life but shortly after his death by his friends. He did this because there were a lot of “burn the witch” things going on so I guess he didn’t want his beans burned. The book itself reads like a mathematical book of proofs where he lays out his Axioms, Propositions, Lemmas and proofs. Due to this it was sometimes difficult to keep up, but there were still many interesting ideas picked up. His two cornerstone ideas (IMO) were his definition of “Substance” and his idea of “God”. To him substance was something that can be explained independent of anything else. With this definition it is really difficult to figure out even one thing that can have this label. (This is a fun mental exercise). His definition of God is linked to his idea of substance in that God is absolute infinite substance. He expands on this idea throughout the whole book as a foundation to his ethics. This could be viewed as a form or inspiration for the following transcendentalism movement.

I enjoyed this reread a lot more than the first time through. There were some points where he takes tangents and side roads which left me at times bored at other times frustrated. Yet the author is well aware of this tendency and warns the reader that it will happen from time to time, so I don’t really have anyone to blame but myself. There were so many parts of this book where it would feel as if I was reading my own journal, had I been a better writer. Several overlapping points of personality made a lot of his views relatable. I very much liked his humble approach to knowledge and latitude when it came to accepting other’s customs. His love for life as it is, not in concept but in embodied reality was refreshing. Everything in moderation, this goes for thought as well as action. I am sure the older I get, the more I will appreciate and understand from this humorous and likeable man. ...

Dostoyevsky’s underground man, Copernican shame, Darwin, the stone wall, and why consciousness without illusion slides toward spite and inertia.

History as moral narrative versus natural fractal systems—humanity as pattern, not protagonist.