{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

I came across a good post in the reddit by a poster named "YuYuHunter" who also maintains Mainlander page. https://www.reddit.com/r/Mainlander/

The shallow tone of people who don't appear to be that brilliant, when they talk about Schopenhauer always baffles me. Some context: this is a philosopher who was considered by Schrödinger to be "the greatest savant of the west", who was so respected by Einstein that his portret hung in his study alongside Faraday & Maxwell, Jorge Luis Borges said that his world view was already so well expressed by Schopenhauer that it was unnecessary for him to do so.

Compare:

    Looking back on Schopenhauer’s philosophy today, it seems almost laughably childish.

To what Tolstoy says:

    Do you know what this summer has meant for me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights as I've never experienced before. I have brought all of his works and read him over and over, Kant too by the way. Assuredly no student has ever learned and discovered so much in one semester as I have during this summer. I do not know if I shall ever change my opinion, but at present I am convinced that Schopenhauer is the greatest genius among men. You say he is so-so, he has written a few things on philosophy? What is so-so? It is the whole world in an incomparably beautiful and clear reflection. I have started to translate him. Won’t you help me? Indeed, I cannot understand how his name can be unknown. The only explanation for this can only be the one he so often repeats, that is, that there is scarcely anyone but idiots in the world.

There is really a lot more in his work to find than these caricatures suggest.

https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/6lu0y9/arthur_schopenhauer_thought_clinging_on_to_life/

Thank you, Ibra.   I had just recently begun exchanging letters with a buddy from my childhood days.  As kids and teens and into adulthood, we have both been into wandering around in the woods all day, feeling more kinship with the creatures of the woods than with the townspeople and their "Main Street".     Now he is up in Pennsylvania without computer/Internet.   He's been pushing old Tolstoy on me.  I sent him a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, which he found to be a "fun" read - claiming that the character, Jones, stole the show ... the black character with the space-age sun-glasses who was always smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke directly into the face of his "boss" - the white/pink lady who owned the bar in which he swept the floors, making sure to knock into a few bar stools in the process.    Whooooo-weeeee!   

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Is it that only I and Schopenhauer are wise enough to understand the senselessness and evil of life?

Well, a rare character from popular culture (TV) may also understand.    Last night I re-read a paper called, Bad Cops and True Detectives: the horror of police and the unthinkable world.   I can't resist the urge to post some excerpts here.


In another scene, where Cohle rousts Lucy, a truck-stop sex worker, he even more  plainly admits the monstrosity of the police power and the “bad” of his own character:

 Lucy: I thought you were gonna bust me.

Cohle: I told you, I’m not interested.

Lucy: Yeah, I know. You’re kinda strange, like you might be dangerous.

Cohle: Of course I’m dangerous.   I’m police. I can do terrible things to people with impunity.

That police are empowered to do terrible things to people with impunity is precisely the sublimated horror of police and because it is tightly bound up with the Cartesian subject/object correlation and the ontology of the world-for-us, it is a horror that few liberal subjects are willing to face or admit. Yet the horror of police is not simply a matter of denial, as plainly depicted in myriad culture texts, police are the monsters preferred over others, the Leviathan over Behemoth, the bad men who guard the door. This is the solicitation of the trap, the active production of subjectivity, whereby liberal subjects renaturalize the gap in the symbolic order with the reaffirmation of the inevitable necessity of the superior violence of police.


 The unthinkable world

If we stopped here, True Detective would still be a useful but not necessarily unique journey into the noxious ideology of the police story. Yet, it is Cohle’s philosophical pessimism and the paradox of a nihilist policeman, which provide one final and particularly powerful avenue for critique. The obvious task here is how to square the disjuncture between Cohle’s  philosophical positions and his chosen profession. Why would a nihilist endeavor to solve crimes, avenge the wronged, punish the violator? Early on, when Hart and Cohle are getting to know each other, we are given a direct answer to these questions:

Hart: Can I ask you something? You’re a Christian, yeah?…

Cohle: Look, I’d consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms I’m what’s called a pessimist… I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law… We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody… I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction—one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Hart: So what’s the point of getting out [of] bed in the morning?

Cohle: I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it’s obviously my programming, and I lack the constitution for suicide.

Here Cohle admits that even he, a man who sees humankind as a “tragic misstep in evolution”, openly decries the futility of existence and advocates planned extinction, cannot deny his programming and the inescapable solicitation of the symbolic order. Despite all his blustering nihilism, Cohle himself “labors under the illusion of having a self”, is “programmed with total assurance” that he is in fact  somebody  — a subject of liberal capitalist social order. As a representative of that order, Cohle cannot escape the Cartesian world-for-us and its Manichean ontology of police.
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PS:

Peace Ibra.   I think it would benefit us to emotionally detach from how this world plays itself out.   Our moods and states-of-mind do not appear to be in our conscious control, and those who "want to be in-charge" will find that their imagined "control" (or security) is an illusion.    I think this may be what Schopenhauer appreciated so much about the ancient Indian (of India) wisdom.  Those ancients seemed to have understood something about the nature of our existence that is lost on "the servile scientists" of the liberal capitalist (symbolic) order.
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BOTTOM-LINE:

I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction — one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

(practical) philosophical counseling ... no certification required since no one is really qualified to insist they are in a position to instruct.

The idea reminds me of a novel called The Schopenhauer Cure in which the protagonist is simply a Schopenhauer disciple who rejects the positive psychology of group-therapy/talk-talk-talk therapy, but the head counselor-technician encourages him to use his Schopenhauerian perspective to do something similar to what Hans Gerding is doing, although there is no mention at all of Schopenhauer's interests in parapsychology which became evident with the publication of On the Will in Nature.

I find myself trying to see the sine and cosine through Schopenhauer's eyes, and sense why Husserl was skeptical about the possibility of mathematizing the phenomenal world.  I consider all the mathematical calculations going on in every creature's brain/entire-body-of-sensory-appartus/nervous-system throughout their days.   When one pulls a car out onto a busy road, the brain is approximating things such as speed and distance, not numerically, but intuitively.  When the squirrel leaps from the branch of one tree to the branch of another, there is a computer made of meat calculating, approximating ...

The intuitive is what pleased Schopenhauer, even if sometimes our intuitions deceive us.

And yet I imagine Schopenhauer's intuitive understanding of the relationship between sine and cosine was far superior and elegant than my own.

It is good to see Schopenhauer getting the recognition he deserves.  He did the western world (and the descendants of the westernized world) a great service by bringing attention to such beautiful contradictions as atheistic religions, or religions without a godhead/ruler/Creator, which attempt to uncover the ideal nature of this existence we are experiencing.

There must be a great difference between ethics and morality, just as there is a great difference between knowledge and intuition.  There is also the element of social control we must consider when contemplating the extraordinary differences between the Realistic/Historical-Narrative Abrahamic Triad religions and the more ancient Idealistic/Philosophical religions from the Asiatics.

Why did the scribes of various cultures deem it necessary to explain this predicament in terms of illusion?   Do we want to know the nature of reality, or do we prefer to deceive ourselves?   Could it be the case that self-deception is built into our wiring to protect our psyche's from anxiety overload were we to know too much for our own good?   

Do we wish to know ourselves?  Are we even capable of knowing ourselves?  Do our socially constructed selves exist in the raw, or is it all in our imaginations?

Schopenhauer points out that we intuit the thing-in-itself via the experience of our own animal body, what Merleau-Ponty calls "the natural self," but does this mean we are able to know this thing-in-itself that breathes us, as well?  If and only if "to know" = "to intuit" ?

Near the end of the 50th minute in the video, around 51:00 or so, he begins to mention something about how phenomenology seems to support the idea of survival as an astral embodied form beyond the bounds of time and space.  He claims that this is what "the phenomenology points at in a very convincing way."

These kinds of discussions remind me of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with the demarcation between a Romantic versus Classical view of the world ... Intuition versus Knowledge ... The world of subjectivity includes dreams, trances, states-of-illness, etc ... the world of the shaman, the world of death and dying and the whole unconscious mesh we are "in" or "as" ... the world of moods and emotions.  The mechanistic view, that we are flesh robots on a dead rock in the middle of nowhere, has objectified and mathematicized the phenomenal world of air, water, earth, fire. 

Still, as Kant said, we cannot confirm the impossibility of some kind of survival beyond time and space.  Robert M. Pirsig explored the differences between cultural conceptions of "ghosts."   There are the folklore understandings of ghosts, but Pirsig introduces the conceptualization of thought itself as ghost, the Laws of Physics as Ghosts.

"... the laws of physics and of logic ... the number system ... the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real." ~ Pirsig

Like ghosts, ideas don't exist in the physical world, the world of space-time which physics describes, the phenomenal world of representation.  Education as mass hypnosis? 

Mathematics as a human construct describing physical reality ...  Both mathematics and the physical reality are experienced and known in space and time by a subjective consciousness. 

I have been wondering again about this huge disparity between ethics and morality, and how the behavior of moralists can be so unethical.  Consider the beheading of the history teacher in France by a disgruntled, highly moralistic youth.

Why is it so easy for me to see the error of the moralists, obsessed with the details of their rules, imposing their fears and delusions on others?  Please, we each ought to thank our lucky stars we are not "famous," for then we might lose a great deal of the mental freedom we presently enjoy.

I am afraid the Buddha of Berlin would have been jumped by a gang of moralistic youth and beheaded were Schopenhauer alive and writing there today.  He did not pull any punches about his disdain for the Quran.

Deja vu ,I guess,is when one thinks something has happened to him before. But what I experience is something rather different.Like a long forgotten piece of memory.
In my entire life,some of my very worst days have been in the city of Calcutta.I don't want to go there and yet circumstances seem to take me there again and again surprisingly.

During my last stay there,I commuted by the subway a great deal.Almost on daily basis. Now, I used to return home from office around 7 pm or 7:30 pm, by that time, its almost completely dark there. I always got off the subway at the very last station of the system ,for it was also the nearest one to my home.Then, I had to climb a lot of stairs to reach the exist. Just before the exist, there was a huge glass fixed in the wall or maybe it was some kind of translucent partition. As I climbed up ,once there were just five or so more stairs to go, I could see my reflection in the glass,and those of the other travelers around me,only, more than a few times I felt as if I saw something different entirely.

Roughly,this is what I can recall-its evening and I am in a very big white building(in Calcutta)-something like a grand hotel or a very important house.I am not sure what historical period it is exactly but I seem to recall that almost everyone in the gathering, maybe it is a dinner or a ball of some kind, is in formal  attire, so maybe, 1910s or 1920s.

Anyway, something bad seems to happen in the gathering but not publicly.
But I seem to recall is that at the end ,I am at the terrace of the building and I have received some kind of a note or a message ,and that note carries devastating information/news for me. After that it gets quite unclear-I either jump off the terrace or shoot myself in the head with a pistol that I am carrying in my coat pocket. It seems that in that period it was quite normal to carry a pistol in the coat pocket to a social gathering because ,in this "vision", I seem to have gone to the gathering in ,what could probably be described as, a cheerful mood.

It is only after I get the message that things really go downhill.
Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.

Well, I am glad I could put it down in black and white, thanks for the opportunity ,Mr.Silenus. I think I feel more relaxed now that what I have jotted it down.

Please take care.