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

Herr Kaspar,

I have begun to recognise why you say that phenomenology originated with Schopenhauer & why the "phenomenological attitude" is of such significance.  It gives me entirely new eyes to re-read The World as Will and Representation with.
My apprenticeship under you(which is still continuing) has been of tremendous help to me-with regard to women,with regard to workplace and with regard  to mathematics. Just what the doctor ordered. The World  as Will  and Representation has become the cornerstone of my philosophy & will always remain so ,however, you have yourself have greatly contributed towards its clarification by presenting a living and breathing example by way of your very life.

In fact, it may be said that you are "The World as   Will and Representation" -in the flesh.

Keep well &  keep doing maths. The  way things are, most people with never be able  to understand your thought,more to the point,they  do not "deserve"  to understand your  thought.

I have finished reading the article which you sent me wherein the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Merleau-Ponty is compared.I think Merleau-Ponty comes close in some ways..but he is not as bold.

I had looked down that road as well (Where Mathematics Comes From) in 2003 or so, then again around 2007, but stopped abrurtly when I ventured West.

The authors do mention Merleau-Ponty in the introduction and are claiming to be following that tradition in phenomenology.   There is, as is par for the course, no mention whatsoever of Schopenhauer (there hardly ever is; it has never been in vogue or en vogue to claim intellectual kinship with Arthur Schopenhauer, unless you are an original thinker yourself, in which case, in Schopenhauer you recognize a kindred spirit).

 The Embodied Mind seems to be just a linguistic metaphor for Schopenhauer's pointing to our very own animal body as the Seat of the Soul and the Engine of Reason.   Our Lebenswelt is understood in terms of references to the body, as far as spatial position with ego as the point of origin.

Schopenhauer simplifies the Unknowable Noumenon by locating its Presence of Mind in our own animal body.  This is where we experience ourselves as drinking water, shooting off an orgasm, squeezing out a solid bowel movement, having our skulls crushed, getting crucified on a tree, hung upside down from a tree by the feet, beat to a pulp by a gang of ruffians and thrown in a ditch to die of pneumonia, etc.,

When the Buddha of Berlin points out the riddle concerning the head being in-the-world and the world-as-representation being in-the-head, I believe this primordial hall of mirrors is hard-wired into the processes of individuation on a biological level.  Ironically, I understand Simone de Beauvoir's observations about death and sex being one and the same thing better having first explored Schopenhauer.

Your readings of these texts will alter the texts themselves since you are incorporating the ideas, many of which will overlap and gel with already existing forms of your own peculiar imagination.   We must always remember that the authors and thinkers of the past are each eating-pooping-orgasming tragicomic creatures themselves.   I praise Schopenhauer so highly because he at least focuses in on taboo subjects, such as our own animal body/bodies.   

He defines the Will to live as Orgasm, second only to Bodily Thirst and Hunger.
A pendulum between extremes.  He describes, often with poetic enthusiasm, our common predicament.   Is this the common predicament the Upanishads must have been about taking a snapshot of?    We are primarily Eaters-of-Food.  That is the one core idea I absorbed from the Upanishads, although I have only read one translation.

I believe Schopenhauer is saying Kant's Thing-in-Itself, the Noumenon - Unknowable by Definition, is experienced as our animal body.  We are Nature, and Nature belongs to Itself (says Badiou?).  If I am Nature, then maybe I will feel my mighty waves wash away bizzaroland, as though purging the earth of flith.   Maybe we might be able to experience the Depths of Our Non-human Being.

An aside:  I think when people claim to know what God wants for us, they are saying, in effect, what the Subject, I, wants.   Plain as day to some, while others, like infants, demand everyone around them pay deference to their religious hang-ups. 

You are on to something with that connection, Holden.  The Embodied Mind is this animal body's lifeworld, the world as in the imagination of organisms in environments ... Whatever it is, it defies reason and logic precisely because reason and logic are the mechanisms of its very own faculties.

I think that, in the midst of all the horrors of life, we might come to find that we are the Mighty Polluted Oceans.  We are the Sky and the Wind and the very Tree that smashes our humanoid skull on the pavement.  Do you think there may be a Divine Relief Valve that switches off when a Pain Threshold is reached?   Might there be an Intrinsic Built-In Great Numbing or will we each be left in agony should we meet a skull crushing Fate?

If I may be so bold as to poke fun at the revered Friedrich Nietzsche, but I sometimes imagine he is only pretending to muster the strength to face Eternal Recurrence.  Nietzsche is bluffing and the price he paid was his sanity.

If this Subject identifies with any archetype, It would prefer the tone taken by Pazuzu in The Exorcist.  That is, were I drowning in the ocean, at some point I would have to "transfer" consciousness from this animal body to the Ocean Itself.   Death does not exist for that which is aware of it [the head], only for the animal body that works so frantically to keep alive and well.

I simply wish to face my own day to day, moment by moment existence squarely.   Cioran suggests that all the scholars studying religious scriptures can't hold a candle to the beggar/scholar who has been able to liberate himself/herself from the Webs of [Maya?] status-titles-Money-Sex-Power-Fame-Attention-Money-MOney-MONEY, not to mention all the fringe benefits of belonging to certain monied clubs and/or corporate-state Entities (The Gods).

[WARNING: often when writing free-style, I tend to take on the persona of one with far more education and status than I actually posses.  I write and speak as though I have already lived and died, and there are even times I write as though I were insensitive to my own "inner data" that tells me the cold temperatures outdoors alone would kill me, and that without the grocery stores and government funds, I am but a pathetic hominid hairless ape whose destiny would be to witness his own animal body starve.  That which writes and speaks does so from inside electric heated structure without oats and beans in cuppards.  It is almost unnatural for me to exist.

Unfortunately Holden, maybe Nietzsche's insanity was a more authentic explanation point to being philosopher-in-the-flesh than all his written "great books."   Life itself as Author, has a sense of humor that is at once morbid and tragic.  The philosopher loses her mind.   The artist loses his vision.  The musician loses her hearing.   The athlete loses his ________.

We experience Will (to Live) in our Animal Presence of Mind.  Often I mimic a cat when crawiling to a good spot to curl with blankets near an edge I can curl into and against.   I gravitate toward walls in small spaces when sleeping.

Observe the Will, Nature as yourself.  It's all too heavy to discuss, but I am certain these kinds of riddles are at the root of many psychatric disturbances.  We are not born into sin, but into madness.  Languages are not equipped to represent the questions burning in our hearts.   We are not able to mathematize our despair.

Nor can we describe the Power of Orgasm ... maybe Orgasm-in-itself is eternal power ... who or what can resist it, other than the hard street drugs which tease the BRAIN with mental-orgasmic-pleasure, deep pleasure.

If the eternal recurrence is anything, it must be orgasm; hence this divide between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, between Apollo and Dionysus, may have to do with one's own psychological response to having been invaded and overtaken by the Orgasmatronic Waterfalls of Three Thousand Succubi.  Some may be so frightened of their own sexual energies that they invent Masks and Personas they themselves are better able to cope with.   They tame their own "demons" - repress Nature/Will, self.

I had read that Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff.   They have a more psyhcological take on mathematics than I care for, but it was a very worhtwhile read, if only through concrete examples of how mathematical concepts are built from perceptual navigational concepts.   Meanwhile, the "family" will refer to me as "the one who did not marry and let the family name die."

Fuuckers.  Fuuckers is what the survivors and future of humanity will be. 

We are writing to the future, but the future will not be interested in anything different than they have been interested in since whenever: food, shelter, orgasms, babies, growing old or getting killed [got water?] horror-maintenance ... absurd comedy [got sleep?].

Laughing and crying about this experience gives one dignity.  That's what I read somewhere, for what it's worth.
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footnote - Cioran ----> notes about comment about "Instant India" ---

I'd like to give a fair warning to the potential readers of Merleau -Ponty's thought.It is easy to view his emphasis on the "body" as the recommendation for being "involved" in the "world", & I don't know, get started with some sort of so-called radical,emancipation politics,particularly in the light of his own flirtation with communism.

If the readers come out thinking that a life of action ( that of the body) is better than that of the contemplation( that of the mind),then that interpretation will be completely false. But such a misunderstanding could arise easily.

The way I see it, I take Merleau-Ponty to be saying that,while we think and contemplate we should not allow over thoughts to go all woolly like that of ,say,Zizek,but should try to think in a Schopenhauerian manner, giving the body and the empirical facts their due.

But that does not mean, that life of action in the form of politics is superior to that like of a near hermit who just thinks and thinks.

The sadness will last forever.