The Ruins of a Book
Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation is one of the great failures of systematic philosophy. What begins with the shimmering architectonics of Kant ends up crumbling into dubious arguments, irascible indictments against humanity, nocturnal evocations of the vanity of all being, cryptic quotes from the Upanishads, and stark, aphoristic phrases, entombed within dense prose, prose that trails off in meditations on nothingness. Schopenhauer, the depressive Kant.
“Your book is a failure.” —- “No doubt, but you are forgetting that I wanted it to be one, and that it could hardly be a success otherwise.” ~ Cioran
I wonder if like the Jews who write commentaries on Old Testament, I could spend my whole life writing about WWR.
If you do that, I would be very interested in which parts of Schopenhauer's opus speak to
you in particular, since you are such a forgiving reader - as far as having insight into one's inner rage, frustration, and disappointment, how one must act as if it is a perfectly acceptable activity to critique this contrivance of horror.
I was encouraged when you innocently confessed to being put off or confused by the very part of Schopenhauer's work, the beginning of WWR, with its shimmering architectonics of Kant, where he demands his readers read Kant first. But Kant is not so interesting as Schopenhauer. He doesn't seem to reveal that inner tension ...
I say I was encouraged, because you appear to have been attracted to the very things Eugene Thacker considers
one of the great failures of systematic philosophy, and I am curious to see if we are attracted to the same elements of Schopenhauer's opus. I wonder if we both find this great failure of systematic philosophy Schopenhauer's greatest, albeit accidental, success.
It would be thrilling to witness you spending your life thinking and writing about those parts of WWR that
crumble into dubious arguments, irascible indictments against humanity, nocturnal evocations of the vanity of all being, cryptic quotes from the Upanishads, and stark, aphoristic phrases, entombed within dense prose, prose that trails off in meditations on nothingness.HT aka Holden Caulfield II - the depressive Nietzsche of India ...
You see, even as you appear young as an individual, you are culturally far older and, I suspect, far wiser than Nietzsche. Looking back only as far as the Greeks or the Hebrews is a joke of cosmic proportions. You, Holden, have far deeper roots, and you might be able to discern just where Schopenhauer (let's call him an accidental genius of European culture) was articulating truths that far more ancient beings figured out long ago.
Schopenhauer was well aware of this, and I always respected him for pointing out, that while "modern man" is impressed with the "new" ... our species may have reached its heights closer to its origins, and now we are in a decadent phase, drowning in stupidity, despite our technological sophistication. Perhaps these are symptoms of the great tiredness.
I rose at 4AM this morning. It is 12 degrees Fahrenheit = -11 Celsius
The weather mocks my words ... Maybe this is what the ancient Hebrews (the people of the book) mistook for ... that word they were not supposed to say ...
Now, there is something I want to do before I carry my carcass to day jail. From my experience with the Internet over the years, obscure yet great little message boards are always disappearing while commercialized corporate websites pollute cyberspace like so many strip malls in the "outer realm". So, I want to get some quotes from
the blog post I linked to above.
I will start a separate entry, forever organizing our chaos. Chaos is ok. It is the nature of our thinking.