{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder
General Category => What Now? => Topic started by: Nation of One on July 29, 2014, 09:49:49 pm
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why do so many poets
write about sunsets
and not about toothaches?
about flowers and not about bedbugs?
about romantic love
and not about arranged business marriages?
it is said that if you smile
the world will smile with you
if you cry, you cry alone
cry out to the empty space
witness the packs on porches
feel the danger of certain streets
keep walking
this is no place for you
to be asking for a drink of water
courage?
don't talk to me about courage
it takes more courage to examine
the dark corners of your own mind
than it does for a soldier
to fight on the battlefield
to philosophize is to learn how to die
teach me how to die
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“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.
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In my seventeenth year,without any learned school education,I was affected by the wretchedness of life,as was Buddha when in youth he caught sight of sickness,old age ,pain & death.The truth which the world clearly & loudly proclaimed ,soon vanquished the Jewish dogma that had been printed in my mind & the result for me was that the world could not be the work of an all-good being but rather of a devil who had summoned into existence creatures ,in order to gloat over the sight of their agony.
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The strange thing with those sentences is that, while one imagines it coming from Hitler's "My Struggles," one can't help but be slapped in the face by the back of Schopenhauer's hand ... it's thoroughly Schopenhauerian.
No matter who wrote this, even if it were Adolf Hitler, this is clearly a moment of clarity common to countless individuals when waking up to the horror of existence.
One could have one's wilderness survival clothes on, one's favorite footwear, cool sunglasses, some cash to play with in one's pocket, perhaps a fresh pack of cigarettes and all that ... one is geared up with camping gear and taking to the mountains ... feeling the life-force within ... and on the way out of the maze, one has to pass through the cities, and one witnesses the unspeakable daily drudgery of the life of a homeless cripple ...
Does one not have the feeling of being in a tiny boat in the midst of a raging sea?
I understand why one would want to come down from the mountain (or, in the Buddha's case, to leave the castle) so as to face the misery head on and join this twisted brotherhood of suffering rather than stand starry-eyed before majestic sunsets, deluded about some Supreme Being of the Universe designing the world for our personal enjoyment.
It is best to come to know how life really is.
Reading Schopenhauer last night, I came across a passage where he writes, "When people pray 'Lead me not into temptation," they are really asking, "Let me not know who I am."
All love is compassion and sympathy.
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The quote is by Schopenhauer himself ,I got it from his biography by Cartwright from the chapter called"Death of a Father,Birth of a Philosopher".I think by Jewish Dogma here,he means the old testament.
I think you are right,Schopenhauer is the final word.When you were in your 20s you thought that Schopenhauer was just the beginning,that you'd come across more profound philosophers but later you realised that it just is not so.I concur.
Jesus,Mr H,even as I write this to you,in the next room,my aunt who's visiting me is scolding her 29 year old son on phone,my cousin ,who's been married for about 2-years now.She's demanding that he sire a grandchild for her ASAP,she's saying that it you don't have a child now,who's going to take care of you in your old age,are you going to have a kid when you are 50? You should not run away from your responsibilities..
As the Old Gentleman said- This scene of misery would never become a garden of pleasure.
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You are very observant, Holden. What you say is exactly right. I really thought Schopenhauer was just the beginning ... It is going to be a real thrill for me to crack open the notebooks from 1990-1991, one I even named "Schopenhauer Disciple", and read through it knowing what I know now, that he really hits the nail on the head in a big way ... The thing is, he is simply a finely tuned instantiation of the thing-in-itself, where his brain was able to observe itself and confess to itself its predicament.
No matter what people may say about him, I can only hope to have that degree of sympathy and compassion in my heart for all creatures I encounter.
Jesus,Mr H,even as I write this to you,in the next room,my aunt who's visiting me is scolding her 29 year old son on phone,my cousin ,who's been married for about 2-years now.She's demanding that he sire a grandchild for her ASAP,she's saying that it you don't have a child now,who's going to take care of you in your old age,are you going to have a kid when you are 50? You should not run away from your responsibilities..
Wow ... guilted into replicating! That's rough.
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x (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=stImV0RomL4)
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When I have had my fill of mathematics, and it is after midnight, I have been grabbing the Schopenhauer biography by Cartwright you had suggested. In one of the sections where he quotes someone's letters or journals, where the print is an aggravatingly small font, but which I force myself to read because of the little gems hiding in there, at the bottom of page 282, where he quotes a reflection by the painter Ludwig Sigismud Ruhl, who I think painted the 27-year old Schopenhauer (is it the painting on the cover of Essays and Aphorisms as well as Magee's biography?), I found a gem.
In three short sentences it brings to light the central issues.
This is the effect listening to Schopenhauer's public disputes had on Ruhl:
"I was all ears at your disputes which both delighted and instructed me ... You aided in my brooding over three questions: Who am I? Why am I? And would it not have been better if I were not at all."
This sheds light on why I would be confounded by anyone's desire for immortality.
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Holden,
I have to thank you for suggesting the biography of Schopenhauer by David E. Cartwright. It is the book I grab at 2AM when I am winding down.
It is great to be able to clarify exactly what it is about Schopenhauer's philosophy that has consoled me throughout my life. It really does blow a hole through this world's idea of itself. I mean, how many miserable people walk around thinking they are miserable do to bad luck, circumstances, Wall Street bankers, landlords, neighbors, police, economic collapse, bosses, the family they were born into, colonizers, lack of opportunity, lack of education, mental illness, alcohol abuse, etc? Surely, I will not minimize misfortune and real social disparity. Taxpayers (the so-called middle class), in the United States, spend more money on keeping prisoners in cells than they invest in education, and many of them can't afford to attend universities themselves. They have more pressing concerns, like paying rent to live indoors and buying groceries.
And yet, to be is to be will, and to be will is to constantly strive and desire.
Notice, even with my so-called "mathematics cure," I most likely will never be satisfied with my level of understanding, but will constantly strive to understand more. Even in the pursuit of understanding, there is a continual striving. This is the nature of the desire to learn: we are forever dissatisfied. A practical philosopher would aim for contentment, which is what I am currently trying to do: giving the middle finger to the whole idea of educating oneself so as to be able to adapt to the technological demands of the information age. Our jailers are not concerned with our education.
I have the biography open to the pages that I was moved by in the middle of the night, around 323 to 326: The will to life is the essence of the world. Everything, therefore, manifests a constant striving, and "all suffering springs from want or deficiency, from dissatisfaction with one's own state or condition, and is therefore, suffering so long as it is not satisfied. No satisfaction, however, is lasting; on the contrary, it is always merely the starting point of a flesh striving, we see striving everywhere impounded in many ways, everywhere struggling and fighting, and hence always suffering."
The wretchedness of existence, Schopenhauer reasons, is not due to the accidental, the coincidental, or bad luck. The basis for the misery of existence lies within the very heart of being. Suffering is inevitable.
To be is to suffer. Schopenhauer, the German Buddha?
That I have been consoled by such truth telling is perhaps what is most difficult to explain to the positive thinking mantra-chanting gorts of mass industrialized consumerist society, or even to the "religious" who might resent me for not using the gifts they claim their imaginary God gave me in a "productive manner". I am as content as can be expected to be, but a man content to just study mathematics with no goals other than deepening his understanding is not going to be consuming the credentials that the gorts associate with "success" and "happiness." This kind of contentment is viewed as laziness. >:(
This is why those of us who are content simply to study must be made out to be "losers."
We threaten this world's idea of itself, the illusion of progress and posterity. We are in the self-same quandary as the Buddha was in. It does not "progress". Progress is rhetorical jive. Wisdom is better than silver and gold.
Why do you think people associate pessimism, antinatalism, and the acknowledgement of the innate wretchedness of existence with some kind of psychological ailment, something that has to do with a personal flaw, a bad attitude? Positive thinking makes me puke, whereas Schopenhauer's philosophy has always consoled me - and it is impossible to explain this to gorts with "positive attitudes" who chant the mantras of progress.
By demonstrating that suffering and death are necessary features of existence, Schopenhauer also thought that he presented a worldview that brought consolation to his readers.
It is not the case that had we some good luck, discovered the means to please the gods, been born at a different time, in a different place, to different parents, that we would have had a happy life. What was, what is, and what will be the case is always the same, because the world is the objectification of the will. Schopenhauer, however, went even deeper. Not only are our miseries, our woes, and death a matter of necessity for beings who are essentially will, but also we deserve what we get; eternal justice prevails.
"For man's greatest offense is that he has been born."
Now, I know John Trudell always proclaimed that he rejects the idea that we are born bad.
I think I had great feelings of respect for John Trudell, and I do not like to disagree with anything he said. I agree that we were not born into sin, but ...We were born into madness! And the nature of the wretchedness of existence would not be alleviated could we return to the lifestyles of our ancestors. There has never been a good time to be born, and there never will be.
How, the gorts wonder, could this kind of truth telling bring anyone consolation?
They just don't get it. Our unhappiness is not a personal flaw, or a sin, or a mental illness, or an effect of poverty or lack of economic or educational opportunity. Our unhappiness is the price we pay for being conscious manifestations of a blind, demonic, insatiable appetite.
The idea that some supernatural force created this situation as a learning experience, which is promoted by those like Gary Zuvak (http://seatofthesoul.com/) does not sit well with me.
I'll leave it at that. I used to really respect that guy when I read The Dancing Wu-Li Masters as a teenager. What the hell happened? I guess he got married and has to cash in on all the misery and confusion.
I am not looking for " a step-by-step process, where each lesson engages me in building the skills I need to become the joyful creator of my own life."
I am consoled by the truth, even if the truth is wretched. There is something about rhetoric such as "the joyful creator of your own life" that I find infantile ... It actually makes me angry.
To each his own, I guess. It's just another example of the kind of inauthentic spirituality that turns me off about the so-called "New Age" movements ...
I guess we reach a point where we see how ignored the truth tellers have been, and we just don't care to argue. It's like Holden points out concerning "Gary's" videos ...
Do people want step by step instructions on how to be "joyful"?
I am content, but never "joyful". There's a big difference. I find something very wicked about those who propose all that is needed is a change in attitude and one can create one's own reality.
It's wicked - and an insult to our intelligence.
Rather than become entangled in debates about whether life is or is not worth living, or to become overwhelmed with uncertainty, I prefer to look up the word "orthonormal" and proceed to yet another section of exercises in a math textbook to focus on.
It is a humbling experience, I think, to focus on studying math rather than promoting a dismal view of existence. Why bother arguing over worldviews?
orthonormal - a set of vectors is orthonormal if they are all orthogonal (perpendicular) to each other, and they have length 1.
One might think, "So what!"
... and there you have it. So what, indeed. The heart may want to focus on the deeper problem of existence itself, but I know where that leads ... It would have been better never to have been born, and that's that. While I exist, I will not pretend to have any solution to the problem of existence other than what thinkers like Schopenhauer and Zapffe have already suggested: end the absurd comedy of reproduction and die out gracefully.
In the meantime, since we cannot simply will ourselves into denying the will to live, we will do as countless other creatures are doing this very moment in staving off our inevitable death. I, personally, enjoy spending the entire day buried in a mathematics textbook. I like to learn and study.
There is a great deal to study, and we each have our own interests and levels of comprehension. When I am studying mathematics, I seem to be able to transcend personal identity, social status, "net worth", debt, political leanings, religious labels (such as atheist), and concerns about the future.
I know that this is as good as it gets for me. Going on an adventure into foreign lands in search of "medicine" in the forests will lead to snakes and hypothermia or extreme thirst. There is nothing to be had in this world.
"What did you DO with your life?"
I spent a great deal of time thinking about how unfortunate one has been to have been born. I studied some math, and then I croaked. Life is not a Hollywood blockbuster, after all.
Here I am, a so-called "failure" living an uneventful life, with access to more free autodidactic education than Kings and Popes of previous centuries. Each day I can spend enjoying the use of my higher faculties, rather than squirming on the ground in a fit of alcohol poisoning, is a little victory for me ... my private revenge against those who promote action over thinking.
I do not need to be a doer. I am content being a thinker.
Thinking is a revolutionary activity in a society obsessed with endless expansion and "productivity."
As a teenager I already knew I wanted to live a contemplative life.
I guess I am a contemplative, a deviant mathematical monk.
In the same sense that any "mystical" movement in which people believe they are having a direct experience of the divine undermines the authority of religious leaders, perhaps my "religious" devotion to mathematics textbooks is my own personal "direct experience of mathematics education."
This enriches my life as a citizen of the world, and connects me to others in this species, alive and dead, no matter what their ethnicity, religion, or nationality.
As the life of Arthur Schopenhauer testifies, at least in the realm of academic philosophy, there is a similar analogy in the history of virtually all faiths: there has been a tension between visionaries and prophets on one hand and hierarchs and administrators on the other.
In these times which could very well be the end of times for our species, when students go into heavy debt to race through difficult material only to stand in line at the welfare office, I am taking my education into my own hands!
I will think for myself, and I will nurture intellectual honesty by taking whatever time I need to get the most from my interactions with the texts.
I don't care if I spend four years covering what would be covered in 2 or 3 semesters. I value my education more than diplomas, credentials, or career opportunities.
FOOTNOTE:
I use the word "content" rather loosely. In a very general sense, I am more content than one might imagine. This does not mean that I am not constantly vulnerable to disagreeable moods and frustrations involved with just being alive, where our will is continually thwarted. If my words seem confused and contradictory, this is simply a consequence of my attempts to be as honest as possible. There is no cure for the wretchedness of existence.
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Really,my friend,your writing is like balm to my soul & thanks to you I downloaded another wonderful book today from Library Genesis.Now,I think this is what Schopenhauer implies:the root of my suffering lies deeper than this present existence of mine, it runs so deep that I am not aware of where it began. I've searched through my memories but I couldn't find any reason to fully explain why I am who I am. I was born with a broken heart.
The will denies itself by recognising itself. First, it bounces around blindly, emanating out forms and then particulars; this, understood as occurring before subjectivity, is the way we must think about some world prior to subjectivity, even though this account is really mythological in that we can only know about things from the advent of subjectivity and therefore of objectivity with it. The will moves about aimlessly, producing new forms, until it happens to create an organism, which is the first step toward the will knowing itself. From this point its activity becomes purposive and it wishes to evolve more complex organisms so that it can better apprehend itself. After plants come animals, and after mere animals come humans: the rational animal. Animals are bound to follow their drives, acting on whichever drive happens to be strongest in them at the time, given the stimuli they are receiving, and paying attention to particulars. But humans can think about experiences, notice the universals or forms embedded in it, and then even the subject-object dichotomy and, at the base of it all, the will. As humans progress through these stages of reducing the plurality down to oneness, intellectually, the will comes to know itself. It sees its own ugliness and ceases to be. It's like the monster looks in the mirror and then wills itself into oblivion.
Schopenhauer speaks to the pained, suffering being . Therefore, he cannot be understood by professional philosophers.Schopenhauer has been the penultimate great philosopher that the history of philosophy has given us. He has been the philosopher that philosophy itself expected . Though,I have to say ,without you,I may perhaps have never studied him so thoroughly.
https://youtu.be/lJ-S-R102Aw
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While reading your description of the will coming to know itself I thought, that's it, this explains why so many people think they are God manifested into the creation so as to experience itself as creature. Your wording makes all the difference in the world, my friend.
You wrote, As humans progress through these stages of reducing the plurality down to oneness, intellectually, the will comes to know itself. It sees its own ugliness and ceases to be. It's like the monster looks in the mirror and then wills itself into oblivion.
This is so much more genuine than hearing someone sanctimoniously decalre, "I am a spiritual being having a physical experience."
We are the blind, demonic will, the creator of all madness and horror ... recognizing our nature for what it is ... and the creation as an accident of cosmic proportions. Perhaps a new mythology might rid us of this notion of divinity once and for all.
May the monster at the core of this world recognize its own ugliness and cease to be.
The will knows itself through us ... but, as we have discussed before, it will continue to go on blindly and even enthusiastically replicating itself in less conscious forms ... When will it exhaust itself?
Life is teaching itself not to want ... not to want to be ... or, to want not to be ...
to be or not to be?
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The whole of creation groaneth & travaileth in pain together(Romans 8.22).
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Tooth decay pain too much for me to endure much longer. Serious obstacles. I may go to the emergency room tomorrow to seek antibiotics. I have not slept in days and I am writhing in pain.
It is more intense than ever before. I really see no way out of this. Human assistance will be necessary. Maybe I can pay installments. Something has to be done, or I will live no more. It is not possible to exist like this.
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Hentrich,
I hope you already have seen a dentist. Last year I did not take of my dental infection and I started having migraines. It is not a pleasant experience. As you say, they wil allow you to pay for the treatment in installments.
Take care.
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It will not be that easy. Most dentists in Dirty Jersey want cash on the barrel. I will see what happens. Maybe the Grim Reaper will spread the rot from the center of the three lower front teeth down directly to my heart and put an end to this absurd comedy.
UPDATE (01/24 Sunday): I will get dropped off at Emergency Dental Clinic Monday morning. I will resist the urge to end the pain altogether, but still would not mind dying on the spot. From my perspective, it really does have everything to do with the pain and my low tolerance for such pain. And yet, there is a good chance that, if left untreated, that tooth decay would spread into the bloodstream, eventually killing this beast.
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In 1954, a man committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, his suicide note simply read "Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache." (https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1paah3/til_in_1954_a_man_committed_suicide_by_jumping/)