Author Topic: The Dark Side (a profound concentration of negativity)  (Read 3604 times)

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Nation of One

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Re: The Dark Side (a profound concentration of negativity)
« Reply #15 on: September 12, 2017, 09:38:01 pm »
Thanks for the heads up.  That is a pricey book, and published just this past April.  I was looking for the author, Dennis Vanden Auweele, in the Library Genesis database, and his 2016 work, Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root, is already there.

Give it time.  The Ruskies may be able to nab it for those of us on a limited income.

That quote about optimism and hope is a bit of a disappointment, I agree.

We sure do have a full plate to work through anyway as far as studying "the Kantian foundations" goes.

Each evening I have been closing the math textbooks a little earlier since I don't want to burn out, and it is such slow going.  It does calm me down to be in my own orbit though.  I would never have thought I would have taken this route, this humble and rigorously honest path of going through a long series of specific high school text books.

I do not think this will enable me to make any contributions to academic philosophy or literature, but I may be showing by example how, even after one is well past their prime and totally detached from academic or professional life, one might keep one's mental life somewhat "together" through committing oneself to a disciplined revisiting of "school mathematics".

Of course I still have to deal with everyday life, taking care of things as they come up, so there is no way to devote every waking hour to this.

It may not be the most romantic solution to coping with the sense of meaninglessness or the frustrations with disciplines devoted to searching for anwers to questions that have no meaningful answers. 

We just have to get through the hours and the days of our lives.

When the cost of an electronic copy of the work is over $50, we can call it "prohibitively expensive".  Does the cost make his work more valuable?

If we are to read it, it will come our way.  Maybe we should look him up and request a free copy, huh?  I mean, since we are authentic disciples of Schopenhauer, after all.

Maybe there exists a gulf between Schopenhauer scholars and Schopenhauer disciples.  Hmmmm .... Sehr interessant. 

Similarly, there may be a gulf between those who have a very high level of education in mathematics (PhD mathematicians) and those who approach mathematics exercises in textbooks as some kind of psychological experiment or even a spiritual exercise (to develop humility and inner [mental] honesty) where one becomes more and more comfortable with the way one's own mind goes about thinking about problems.

If my method of "disciplined study of fundamental mathematics for my own mental health" appeals just to a few people, one being yourself, then I will have made some kind of contribution.

I am sure you will find people all over the world who would agree that their interest in mathematics has become a central factor of their existence.

Philosophy itself, much like the gems from "Eastern Religions," has been absorbed into modern [Western?] pop psychology as a means to finding what people call "happiness" or "contentment" --- or even "inner peace" via meditation.  I can't be too critical of this tendency.  Who can blame anyone for trying to make some sense of this absurd situation we find ourselves in?

The thing with my interest in Schopenhauer is that I think he would see my lifestyle as a kind of "path of least resistance" or "as close to living in a one man monastery without a God as one can get.'

By going back to revisit fundamentals, and spending a great deal of time --- an exhaustive study engaged in day after day with a kind of religious dedication --- I do manage to short-circuit the insatiable "will to know".  I mean, I realize that I can not swallow all there is to know, and that I can only focus on so very little in any given present moment.

So many want to dive into subjects like Theoretical Physics or even Computational Physics, and yet, first thing in the morning, those same people may be surprised to witness their brains struggling to solve a far more elementary problem in basic Euclidean Geometry.

You mention the man who Schopenhauer visited in the mental asylum.  I think our efforts to spend our lives trying to better understand his philosophy would be respected by Schopenhauer himself.  The entire planet has become one huge Open Mental Asylum, and we are its inmates, each in his cell.  In fact, one can consider oneself fortunate just to have a cell to hide in.

I have no doubt that whatever we are able to discover in our study of the translations of Kant's work, along with what we have absorbed of Schopenhauer's thought, we will gladly post in as organized a fashion as we are able to, and that we would never seek the sell any of it, nor do I expect to be acknowledged as any kind of authority on Schopenhauer.

And yet!

We are Arhtur Schopenhauer's disciples.   It's kind of funny.  We have no authority since we are only disciples and not "scholars from the High Cultural Elite". 

May you find some peace in your readings and meditations.

For now, we'll have to forget about this scholar, Dennis Vanden Auweele, unless, of course, we want to take a look at Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root, which I mentioned above.

PS:  I don't want to sound bitter towards the work Auweele put into The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer's Pessimism.  I am confident that Schopenhauer would be glad that it will enrich the burgeoning field of Schopenhauer studies.  One day, we probably will read it ourselves (May Library Genesis be protected against those who do not believe in this kind of FREEdom.)

As for how I view my own personality, while I have been "scholarly" throughout my life, I do not have the patience or the discipline to approach any "Philosophy of Life" in a systematic manner.   I would never presume to devise any kind of systematic explanation of our lived experience.  Maybe I'm just humble or modest, or maybe I am just honestly stating a brute fact.   Whay i take Schopenhauer's word as gospel, i am not sure.  I just have this inexplicable trust that he put a great deal of thought into what I wrote, and that he felt he may have hit upon solving the riddle of existence, that life teaches us not to want it anymore, and that, in the final analysis, we are nothing.  There is no "I".  I do not exist.

Whatever it is that we call "I" is just as much in my head as it is in your head or in the head of this Dennis Vanden Auweele.  Since we are all equally nothing in the end, it really does not matter whether we contribute anything more to the field of Schopenhauer studies.  How we live and what becomes of us in this world (our fate?) may define us more sharply than any words we have written.

In death we are nothing, and so I would like to get used to this state of being nothing, being nobody.  This is what we really are ... nothing.

When we are engaged in figuring out how to go about solving some mathematics problem, we are using our brains, juggling abstract mental constructions.  It's a weird sensation.

With philosophy, religion, sociology, politics, two people can come to different conclusions based on their opinions.  This is not so with mathematics.  I like that when we look at the same polygon and attempt to determine how many triangles will fit in it by drawing lines from one vertex to all the other vertices, that we will come up with the same solution.  It doesn't even matter that triangles only exist as mental constructs.

PS:
If there were a "religious symbol" that best representated "science," it would be the Cartesian plane, the x-y axes, or the x-y-z axes.
« Last Edit: October 17, 2017, 11:32:25 am by Non Serviam »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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