Author Topic: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble  (Read 4675 times)

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Holden

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Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« on: August 12, 2015, 06:58:46 am »
The year 1848 was decidedly nervewracking for the established rulers of Europe. Not only had Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto at the year's beginning, calling on the proletariat to rise up and throw off their chains, but bourgeois-democratic and progressive forces were out on the streets of European capitals, demanding the overthrow of the old quasi-feudal order. Before the year was out, France, Italy, Denmark, Germany, the Austrian Empire and the Netherlands had seen popular uprisings, the monarchies in France and Denmark had fallen, and serfdom had been abolished in Austria and Hungary.
Not everybody was sanguine about this upsurge in revolutionary consciousness. Holed up in his Frankfurt apartment, Arthur Schopenhauer, who had written so powerfully of the importance of compassion, was worried that the "sovereign canaille" - the rabble on the streets - would deprive him of his wealth. He dismissed the leaders of the German revolt as "students gone wrong" and suggested that the materialism of their philosophy - eat, drink, there is no pleasure after death - was a kind of bestialism. His biographers report that he began to economise, gave up his daily lunches at the Zum Schwan inn, and was prone to bouts of rage and fearfulness.
Matters came to a head in Frankfurt on September 18th, when the simmering tension of the previous months spilled over into violence, sparked by the new German parliament's endorsement of a peace treaty between Denmark and Prussia that favoured the status quo. The result was barricades on the street, the brutal murder of two conservative politicians, and a bizarre encounter between Schopenhauer and the Austrian army.
Schopenhauer's apartment on the Schone Aussicht afforded the philosopher a good view of the day's tumultuous events, and he didn't much like what he was seeing. His biographer, David Cartwright, reports that he watched "a disorderly crowd of people armed with poles, pitchforks and rifles pour across the bridges from Sachsenhausen." Snipers from the Austrian army took up strategic positions, and fired into the crowd.
It was at this point that things took a rather surreal turn. Schopenhauer heard a commotion outside his locked apartment, followed by loud banging on his front door. Fearing that the sovereign canaille had finally tracked him down, he left it to his maid to go see what all the fuss was about. She reported back that it was not the rabble at the door, but rather the Austrian army. Schopenhauer was thrilled.
Immediately I opened the door to these worthy friends. 20 stout Bohemians in blue pants rushed in to shoot at the sovereign canaille from my window. Soon, however, they thought better of it and went to a neighboring house. From the first floor the officer reconnoitered the crowd behind the barricade. Immediately, I sent him my big, double opera glasses...
The idea, of course, was for the officer to use the glasses as a rifle-sight to make it easier for him to take pot shots at the rabble in the street below.
It is fair to say that Schopenhauer was not a great fan of revolutions; he was, as Bryan Magee puts it, "a counter-revolutionary, a reactionary in the strict sense of that word." It is no great surprise, then, that he called for Robert Blum, one of the leaders of the Frankfurt uprising, to be hanged; that he sang the praises of Prince Alfred Windisch-Graetz for successfully quelling the rebellion; and that a few years later he left a large sum in his will to the "fund for the relief of the Prussian soldiers who... had become disabled in their struggle for the maintenance of law and order in Germany, and of the next of kin of those who had fallen in this struggle".

I’m certain there is a lesson here,somewhere..
« Last Edit: August 12, 2015, 07:00:55 am by Holden »
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Re: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« Reply #1 on: August 12, 2015, 09:03:32 am »
Does this change how you feel about Schopenhauer's philosophy?

I have mixed feelings, for sure. 

What comes to my mind are the crowds on Black Friday when "the people" are in a mad rush to go shopping.  I reflect upon the way crowds behave in spectator sports and even some rock concerts.

I am not sure if I have much love for "the people".

It's all such a nightmare, Holden. 

Where would anything lead?  I guess we have to take it for what it's worth.  Like I mentioned in another thread, I can become very frustrated with words. 

I don't know where I stand.  We have both alluded to how fortunate Schopenhauer was to be able to live on an inheritance.  He still chose a scholarly lifestyle.  I still appreciate the work he passed down to us.

We each are born into our own circumstances.  I find it hard to have any faith in "the revolution" although I do support raising the minimum wage as I can attest that seeking higher education in mathematics, computer science, or even engineering may not be enough for one to rise out of the unskilled labor pool. 

I see no shame in stocking shelves in a grocery store, and learning is a lifelong project. 

Damn, Holden.  It's all so complicated, if I were hard pressed to choose a side, I would not know what to do.   I am certainly not wealthy, so I would not risk my life to defend others' capital and property, but I am no fan of riotous crowds either.

Can't we just quietly disappear into the void and forget about publishing our critique?   :-\

I'm feeling rather lazy and uninspired.   8)
« Last Edit: August 12, 2015, 12:30:46 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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Holden

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Re: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« Reply #2 on: August 13, 2015, 05:25:44 am »
Au contraire. What I wrote ,in a way, beautifully illustrates what S.meant when says “Qualitas Occulta”.So long as we have the principle of sufficient reason, causality,space ,time, principium individuationis,a blind craving Will-there can be no revolution by definition.
They have not abolished slavery, only made it politically correct. They cannot, if they wanted to.

A thought experiment: S. helps the “rabble”.
Consequence:He loses his money & peace. The rabble’s so-called revolution gets crushed anyway.  But of course,S.was no emotional fool.
« Last Edit: August 13, 2015, 05:28:05 am by Holden »
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Re: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« Reply #3 on: August 13, 2015, 05:44:20 am »
I guess Schopenhauer was very intimate with the will, even the will-of-others.

That's why he slept with a loaded revolver by his pillow!   ;)
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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Holden

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Re: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« Reply #4 on: August 13, 2015, 07:52:15 am »
There is but One WILL.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
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On the Will in Nature
« Reply #5 on: September 22, 2015, 12:58:09 am »
The Will in Nature (plus Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason)

I don't know if the other one made it.  Maybe you can grab it directly.  This copy looks like it is actually from 1890, only shortly after Schopenhauer's death.

It's kind of cool looking.  Very old pages.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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Re: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« Reply #6 on: September 22, 2015, 02:38:23 pm »
Thank you my friend.
Schopenhauer ask in his  essay On the Foundation of Morality, "How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?...This is something really mysterious, something for which no basis can be found in practical experience. It is nevertheless of common occurrence, and everyone has had the experience. It is not unknown even to the most hard-hearted and self-interested. Examples appear every day before our eyes of instant responses of this kind, without reflection, one person helping another, coming to his aid, even setting his own life in clear danger for someone whom he has seen for the first time, having nothing more in mind than that the other is in need and in peril of his life..."



Schopenhauer's answer to this question is that this immediate reaction and response represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization---namely (as he states the idea in Sanskrit), "tat tvam asi, thou art that."

"This presupposes," he declares, "that I have to some extent identified myself with the other and therewith removed for the moment the barrier between the 'I' and the 'Not-I'. Only then can the other's situation, his want, his need, become mine. I then no longer see him in the way of an empirical perception, as one strange to me, indifferent to me, completely other than myself; but in him I suffer, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enfold my nerves."

"Individuation is but an appearance in a field of space and time, these being the conditioning forms through which my cognitive faculties apprehend their objects. Hence the multiplicity and differences that distinguish individuals are likewise but appearances. They exist, that is to say, only in my mental representation. My own true inner being actually exists in every living creature as truly and immediately as known to my consciousness only in myself. This realization, for which the standard formula is in Sanskrit is tat tvam asi, is the ground of that compassion upon which all true, that is to say unselfish, virtue rests and whose expression is in every good deed."

Im certain that the Buddha has not attained salvation,for I have not attained salvation.
And neither has Schopenhauer,for you have not attained salvation.Is that why Gary strives?
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
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Re: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« Reply #7 on: September 22, 2015, 03:09:02 pm »
Yes.  There is no salvation, reward, nor punishment ... and yet, if eternity is in a mustard seed, then we experience our punishments and rewards in the Now. 

The "salvation" seems to be only a temporary state of release from care and worry, but are not our "punishments" (strong cravings and wants) also temporary - erased by death?
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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Re: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« Reply #8 on: September 23, 2015, 12:49:08 pm »
The best way to understand Kant, is to first understand Hume and then understand the different philosophical approaches between both Kant and Hume. As Kant stated: ‘From this it follows incontestably, that pure concepts of the understanding never admit of a transcendental, but only of an empirical use, and that the principles of the pure understanding can only be referred, as general conditions of a possible experience, to objects of the senses, never to things in themselves…’ — Critique of Pure Reason, 1781.

Influenced by Hume, the basis of Kant’s resistance to the contemporary philosophers of that day (orthodox rationalism) who held that knowledge is expressed from reason, is his ‘thing-in-itself’, that our minds cannot come into direct contact with ultimate reality because our brains are pre-fitted with many various concepts and sensory filters. This follows that since knowledge is expressed through experience rather than reason, what we perceive and understand as reality, is in actuality a step or two removed from things in themselves.

Where Kant differs from Hume is on the very nature of experiences, Kant denied the classical empiricist position (that experiences cement themselves on the brain), to Kant the idea that concepts are a result of experiences and depend upon them and cannot exist before them seemed totally ridiculous. Hume maintained that concepts e.g. such as the minds notions on space, time etc.. are based upon observations within an experience, Kant ultimately refuted this by peeling back Hume’s ideas and evaluating them at square one.

Kant achieved this by the following, in concerns to say the concepts of time and space, how can we as humans experience that one thing is next to another thing (space) or that one event happens after another (time)? Unless we already have concepts such as ‘next to’ and ‘after’ i.e. the concepts of time and space built into our minds to begin with, Kant solidified this argument by making clear that if such things were not already built into our minds to begin with, we could never even make sense of the complexity that is perception. Concepts of space, time along with an army of other ‘categories’ such as quality, relation, cause, quantity must be inherent to thought, Kant believed, they are forms in which we impose on experiences in order that we may understand and organise them — to make sense of them.

In addition to this, since everyone shares the same thoughts on space, time and such therein, Kant also upheld that these ideas are not only innate but are also universally contained. If space and time only exist in the mind, as Kant pretty much implies, then by experiencing the world as existing within time and space we are in fact just experiencing how the world appears to us, not really how it is. The oasis-mirage you see in the desert, is really just sand.

Do you agree that its all a mirage?
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Re: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« Reply #9 on: September 23, 2015, 03:56:26 pm »
Quote
Unless we already have concepts such as ‘next to’ and ‘after’ i.e. the concepts of time and space built into our minds to begin with, Kant solidified this argument by making clear that if such things were not already built into our minds to begin with, we could never even make sense of the complexity that is perception.

This reminds me very much of "Where Mathematics Comes From" ... (Lakoff) ... you know, the way the very foundations of the theory of numbers and counting is firmly rooted in concepts such as "next to" and "after" ... and, you are absolutely on point suggesting that we cannot imagine space without the concept of time any more than we could possibly imagine time without the concept of space.

Is it all a mirage?  In some sense, yes, quite definitley.  It's a mirgae in the sense that its all just data from sensory receptors fed to the "understanding" which translates the raw data into some kind of approximation of our "situation."

I think that, as a teenager, I was so drawn to hallucingens because they made the illusory nature of "the real world" clear.

There is a joke and I hardly remember how it goes, but it ends with me getting crushed by a big fat elephant who is a figment of my imagination!   ???
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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Re: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« Reply #10 on: September 27, 2015, 01:13:18 pm »

I read your new article on your blog.Very well written.Been thinking of the painting Scream.Did you know that S.inspired it?Munch wrote how the visionary experience of The Scream came to him:

I went along the road with two friends—
The sun set
Suddenly the sky became blood—and I felt the breath of sadness
A tearing pain beneath my heart
I stopped—leaned against the fence—deathly tired
Clouds over the fjord of blood dripped reeking with blood
My friends went on but I just stood trembling with an open wound
in my breast trembling with anxiety I heard a huge extraordinary
scream pass through nature.

The experience came to him high up on Ekeberg at sunset. Ekeberg is to the east of Oslo. 

The main slaughterhouse for the city was up there, and so was Gaustad, the city’s madhouse, in which his relative had been incarcerated. He had probably gone up there to visit him. The screams of the animals being slaughtered in combination with the screams of the insane were reported to be a terrible thing to hear.

 The Scream  is the the image on the reverse, the hidden side of the eyeball as Munch looked into himself. Strindberg’s interpretation was, ‘A scream of fear just as nature, turning red from wrath, prepares to speak before the storm and thunder, to the bewildered little creatures who, without resembling them in the least, imagine themselves to be gods.’

It is often linked with Schopenhauer’s concept of dread. Writing in Philosophie der Kunst, Schopenhauer ponders the degree of expressiveness that a work of art can achieve and he sets the challenge for pictorial art to reproduce a scream.

 Munch's words: ‘And for several years I was almost mad—that was the time when the terror of insanity reared up its twisted head. You know my picture, The Scream? I was being stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood—I was at breaking point . . . You know my pictures, you know it all—you know I felt it all. After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love .
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Re: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« Reply #11 on: September 27, 2015, 03:17:21 pm »
That's an extreme scenario, the screaming animals at the slaughterhouse and the inmates of the madhouse screaming with dread and anxiety ... I found a similar artistic expression, although not as intense, in Celine's Journey to the End of the End, where he can't help but overhear a husband and wife involved in a violent argument.  Just sitting in one's apartment with the sounds of life playing itself out ... the battling of the wills and so forth ...

I have heard people say there is safety in numbers, and yet masses of any creature seems more like a horror.

Maybe I find such peace in researching mathematical ideas, looking at anonymous code, changing it a little to suit my private purposes, and all that, is because, while thousands of individuals contribute to the wealth of knowledge being zapped throughout all these computer networks, we each are separated into our little private cells where our wills (and creative impulses) do not clash. 

Many derogatory and denigrating remarks are made about those who are "self-absorbed", but that is where the inner action is going on.  It's not about numbers, but about insight. 

And while I have tender feelings toward someone like "Pope" Francis, I also see the irony that the one who "Saint" Paul was supposedly the central motivation for building a "Church" had advised his "followers" not to make a circus out of "prayer" but to go lock themselves in a room alone and pray in privacy.

So, whereas some are horrified by the extreme cases like screaming animal life being slaughtered in an efficient and mechanical manner, as well as the sounds of those moaning and groaning in despair in huge factory-like prisons and dungeons, there is also this subtle horror one can experience just viewing mass society in action ... the madness and politics ... How did Schopenhauer describe it?  Parades, horns, bells and whistles ... and what is going on?   Fanfare ... red carpets ... What is all this monkey business?

Oh, by the way, I attached a few pages to what will most likely eventually become Chapter 19 of Dead End.  For whatever reason, while just responding to a comment, I must have had a clear mind, and I realized that is the kind of writing I would put in "the philosophical diary".   Kind of uncanny.
« Last Edit: September 27, 2015, 04:00:27 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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Schopenhauer Vs Newton
« Reply #12 on: September 28, 2015, 04:09:29 am »
In Weimar S. had become acquainted with Goethe, for whom he felt an admiration almost religious in its intensity, and had studied the theory of colors which the poet was passionately advocating against the generally accepted theory of Newton. The result was a new work, On Vision and Colors. Schopenhauer followed in the footsteps of Goethe, attacking Newton unsparingly, but introduced certain speculations of his own not wholly in agreement with the poet's.

Are you familiar with this conflict?What do you think of it.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
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Re: Schopenhauer, Opera Glasses and the Rabble
« Reply #13 on: September 28, 2015, 10:26:21 am »
I will think about this.  I was aware of his reverence for Goethe.  Wasn't he a bit peeved that his mother was some kind of social butterfly?  She was only 17 when she married his father, who was older.  Did she entertain Goethe.  I'm not sure ...

As far as Schopenhauer attacking Newton's theories, it wouldn't surprise me.  Arthur Schopenhauer appears to have been tormented by a "strong will".
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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I looked into this, and as I was just going through sympy.physics.mechanics, I thought of how the name Newton is associated with the kind of Physics that we call Mechanics.  I remembered your post about Schopenhauer's hesitance to go along with Newton's theories, and I thought maybe there is a connection with Quantum Physics.

So I did a quick search and download a 20 page paper from Academia.

I will try to attach it to this message.

Quote from: Raymond B. Marcin
What contemporary quantum physics seems to be telling us is that deep down, way below the microscopic level, the world is not a world of spatially and temporally located particles of matter – it is not the world of phenomena.  “Particleness” itself is a subjective imposition that enters the picture only when an “observer” enters.  Unobserved – or as Schopenhauer would put it “un-represented to our perceiving instrument,” or “outside the world as representation,” or  “in the world as Will,” – true reality, at its deepest level, consists of “possibilities, tendencies, and urges.”

It seems that even for the quantum physicists it is difficult to avoid anthropomorphisms like the word “urges”.  The quantum physicists may indeed be telling us that the world, at that level of deep reality, is “Will” (and its dehumanized, inanimate correspondent), and that what we take to be the attributes of “matter” are really subjective impositions, i.e., events that occur in the acts of observing and perceiving – or events that our perceiving instrument represents to us.  It seems difficult to conclude otherwise – or so one might imagine Schopenhauer arguing.

The file did not attach itself.   I will send via email.

I will also read it in full before commenting again.

It's called "Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics and Contemporary Quantum Theory"


Notes:

 It is in the implications of the theory of quantum physics that Schopenhauer’s metaphysics find their closest analogue.

Schopenhauer’s influence on later artists, writers, philosophers, psychologists – thinkers in general – is well known.  One need only mention a few, like Wagner, Turgenev, Zola, Proust, Hardy, Conrad, Melville, Mann, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Jung.  Less well known, however, is the fact that, in the world of the hard science of physics, several of the originators and developers of quantum theory had studied and found much to admire in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.  Moreover, it is not simply that many of the quantum physicists, like Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, and others, studied Schopenhauer and appreciated his philosophy.  The connection between Schopenhauer and these great physicists goes beyond mere study and appreciation.  Schopenhauer may have influenced the thinking of at least some of them.  And beyond the notion that the writings of Schopenhauer may have influenced the thought of some of the great quantum physicists, there is, influence or no, a remarkable consonance between the tenets of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and the tenets of contemporary quantum theory.

 Pauli’s biographical data demonstrate his rich familiarity with Schopenhauer’s philosophy.  In a letter to his colleague Victor Weisskopf, written in 1954, some time after his major contributions to quantum theory, Pauli described his (Pauli’s) own philosophical orientation:  “My own philosophical background,” wrote Pauli, “is a mixture of Schopenhauer (minus the determinism of his times), Lao Tse, and Niels Bohr.”  In another letter, this time written to the analytical psychologist Carl Jung, Pauli wrote:  “As you well know, in regard to religion and philosophy, I come from Lao-Tse and Arthur Schopenhauer.”  Pauli expanded on those terse statements in another letter to the philosopher H. L. Goldschmidt:

"The East as a whole has made a strong impression on me [wrote Pauli], China even more than India, both the ideas of the I-Ching (Yin-Yang polarity) and also Lao Tse.  Schopenhauer’s attempt to bring Kant and Buddhism under one umbrella I found very interesting, but, owing to Kant’s recalcitrance and Buddha’s passivity in the face of the world, not successful."

Schopenhauer’s dual world is a strange one indeed – every bit as strange as the dual world of the quantum theorists.  At the ordinary level – the phenomenal level, i.e., the level at which we normally perceive things – we experience things and events as discrete and concrete “realities”.  But at that other level, the level of true reality, the level of thing-in-itself – the noumenal level – it is quite a different situation.  At that deep level, which we can experience only dimly and inferentially, all is “will”, a chaos of tendency – tendency to exist, to occur, to live, to interconnect, and to survive. 

The point is that contemporary quantum physicists also posit a dual reality.  At the ordinary level – the level at which we live and work – we experience things and events as discrete and concrete “realities”, realities that are quite adequately explained in terms of Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry.  But at that other level, the level of true reality, the submicroscopic level of “thing-in-itself” as understood by the quantum physicists, all is … what?  Waves?  Waves of what?  Waves of probability, of tendency.  Reality at the quantum or thing-in-itself level seems to be a chaos of tendency – tendency to exist, to occur, to live, to interconnect, and to survive – patterns of probabilities – searching for a word that isn’t there.  Schopenhauer chose the word “will”. 

“The fundamental tenet of the Vedanta school consisted not in denying the existence of matter, that is, of solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending that it has no essence independent of mental perception; that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms.”  These words [wrote Schopenhauer] adequately express the compatibility of empirical reality with transcendental ideality.


« Last Edit: October 01, 2015, 09:46:59 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~