Schopenhauer would have approved of your life style.Not only are you on the right track ,you have been kind enough to help me a great deal too.
Imagining Schopenhauer approving of my lifestyle makes me smirk, smile even. It means more to me than the approval of my own deceased grandparents.
Over the years, "God" willin' n' the crick don't rise, I would like to be able to encourage and assist you in a lifelong study of your mathematics. My decision to revisit high school mathematics may, in the long run, work in your favor, as I may become more and more enthusiastic about much of the material you might also be exploring in your own manner.
There are various ways to approach those "core" subjects, some very formal, and others less traditional (using graphing software and computer algebra systems).
There are several legs this table has to stand on.
This is your blog,Mr.H, and if you ever decide to shut the blog down, I will understand your decision. Once again I thank you for allowing me to write here. I must say that this blog is like a confessional box in a Catholic temple.
I would not shut down this message board. Remember the blog at wordpress? I just lost interest and stopped posting there when I began communications with Holden here.
This message board was simply a way to keep our dialog organized as opposed to email which nowadays gets swamped with redundant coupons from booksellers and a bunch of other redundant shiit.
I am glad you refer to this as a temple. I suppose it may seem contradictory to some that I am drawn to words such as temple and monastic while being repulsed by the word God. Maybe this is why I have such respect for Buddhism and whatever culture it was spawned by (the ancient Hindus? I am not an expert). Like Schopenhauer, I was so relieved to behold a religion which took no interest in the concept of a creator deity or so-called author or programmer of the universe. It's main focus is the suffering entailed in existence for the creatures born into this.
So, I have no intention of deleting this board. When I feel what is on my mind is just too petty and technical and self-absorbed, I may just lurk and read what others are writing about.
Which leads to ...
It might be best if I stepped away from this site to help you feel free to express yourself, because I will not hold thoughts and use of a word, that best symbolizes the biggest idea about my philosophy, back, just because it bothers you. This would take away from my ability to clearly communicate thought, likely similar to what you are putting yourself through now.
I was only pointing out that, while you claim that this word God best symbolizes the biggest idea about your philosophy and that not using the word would take away your ability to clearly communicate thought, I insist that your use of the word God can only lead to ambiguity and hamper your ability to communicate clearly.
Holden very politely mentions that the word Will is a much clearer description of our lived reality and the nature of our predicament, the nature of all that is, from the subjective perspective of each living entity. While I am in no position to limit what words you choose to use or not, I am emphasizing that using such a word as God, no matter whether you mean "Nothingness", "Void", "The Universe", "The World", "The Devil", "Orgasm", "Love", "Hate", whatever ... the word God is not at all CLEAR. It in no way helps you communicate your
philosophy.
So, forthebirds, please, do not abandon Holden just so as not to upset me with your God talk. We are both fairly calm and even-tempered. Let us not hold back then.
This temple needs no God to make it a holy place.
You could write the word Blah-Blah-Bling in the place of the word God and it would carry the same meaning for me. In other words, the word God does not really communicate anything whatsoever. It's like "The Absolute" in philosophy, supposedly signifying some underlying source of all that is, and yet ... one certain pessimistic philosopher, Emile Cioran, used the word God often, but I think he used it tongue in cheek with some sarcasm and a touch of blasphemy. What do I know? I'm just me, just another manifestation of the Will to Live.
CIORAN:I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.
I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.
Consciousness is nature's nightmare.Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness.A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.
The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.
All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
Creation is in fact a fault, man’s famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator’s example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That was Cioran's style, I suppose, to use the common-sense ideas about "the Creator", "the Lord" in the way so many do, as though it were an undeniable given, like the undefined terms point, line, or plane. He takes it for granted that everyone knows who this God character is. Well, I suspect Cioran would be a difficult person to endure. I say that even though his writings have made a deep impression on me.
I'll try not to be too judgmental of your ideas and your way of expressing your philosophy. After all, I suppose each individual has a right to his or her own particular way of making some sense out of their existence, and, for many, the idea of a supreme being, a first cause, a "spirit that moves through all things", or even "the Great Spirit" must be common in the imagination of the species ... Still, having said all that, the word "God" does not express as much as "the spirit that moves through all things."
And even the word, "spirit", is a tad bit too other-worldly sounding. I like Schopenhauer's use of the word "Will". It removes all the mumbo-jumbo hocus-pocus voodoo bullshiit from the equation leaving us to contemplate the veins and sinews, the blood, guts, bones, nerve-endings, tooth decay, excrement, the foul odor of our very own breath, and, yes, the wonder of the thought processes in our heads. I should not be so surprised that so many would ascribe the inner voices of their own brains to some other-worldly transcendent supernatural entities or aliens even.
The entire world is in our heads, but our heads are in the world. When I read that line by Schopenhauer, I immediately suspected that he might have been on some level a comedian, not the stand up comic type, but more of a kind of man who might say things to people in passing that they would think about for the rest of their lives ... every damn day of their lives.