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

All science is relative to the phenomenal world and our perceptions in space and time.  It is very counter-intuitive to stand outside the process and consider "the world" minus the knowing sentient life-form/creature.

Scientists deal with the physical world, hence Physics.  Schopenhauer and Kant were dealing with the metaphysical.  I imagine this stance is meaningless to natural science.  I feel so ridiculous writing about things as if I know something others do not.   Please understand that I am just letting my mind exhale.

I'm currently reading On the Will in Nature where he does find some scientists who are supportive of his views without actually acknowledging him.  I will keep this in mind.

What first attracted me to the work of Edmund Husserl were his ideas about questioning the reality of the objective world, or setting the question of its existence aside.  Isn't that the phenomenological epoche? 

Schopenhauer would consider the standard "objective view" of most scientists as being naive.

It's naive realism to forget that this world is the product of illusion in space and time.

I think the difficulty in wrapping our minds around this is similar to the counter-intuitive notion that the entire creation vanishes with the creature.

Just imagine that zone between sleep and wakefulness.   What is real?

Look at the scenario playing itself out in Western Europe where those who reproduce the most shall inherit the future.  From one standpoint, some would want to compete in this carnival of poop, but for those who disappear, the world itself disappears, and those left bragging about the glory of Allah and making babies are left in perpetual suffering, perhaps even dying out anyway through starvation or rising sea-levels.

To drown must be horrifying, I know.  I wake up at night sometimes from a dream where I am drowning ... and yet, as the lungs fill with that real water, and the blood stops flowing, the heart stops beating, where is the objective world?   Where are the nations and religious sects?  Where are the babies?  Where is The World as Will and Representation? 

I don't presume to know the answers.  I'm just thinking out loud.  I was watching some video about the war of the womb scenario over in Europe, and I read comments about the slow death of European-type human beings, how such types are choosing not to marry or breed ... and I think of Schopenhauer, and I think of Hitler, and I think and think and think ... Why fight it?  I feel so resigned.  I guess I can't judge others too harshly since everything is just what it is.  Those who want to populate the globe would mock me as defeatist.  Nietzsche would criticize me harshly the way he criticized Schopenahauer.  Hitler would be ashamed of me ... since I say NO to this absurd comedy where he would wish I said YES. 

I almost want to laugh at those who brag about out-breeding ... and I can honestly say that Schopenhauer wrote one of the greatest essays lambasting the Koran as a wretched book.

I am glad to be among those soon to be no more.

It's funny to hear things like "... f*cking him off the planet" as if we are in some kind of breeding contest.   

What shall we write to the future?   The reason I mention Hitler and Schopenhauer is because I would like to know how both would critique the scenarios playing out all over the planet, with some people resisting religion and procreation, and the surviving peoples paying deference to religion and bragging about having 4 wives and 22 children ... What would Hitler say?

What would Schopenhauer say?

This is very relevant, always relevant ...

Who wants to live forever?   Also, sex is definitely over-rated by ignoramuses.

The gods hide the happiness of death from man so that he will endure life.



One of the comments:

awesome video. support from India to all right wing nationalists to remove kebab. we have tried many times but failed. our leftists leaders have betrayed us too. what had happened in India hundreds of years ago is now happening in Europe. Good luck

In the near future, I am going to search for a good open-minded biography on Emile Cioran and his political views back in the 1940's ... The same for Louis-Ferdinand Céline.  Over the years I have been able to find and read all of Celine's novels, but none of his non-fiction.  I mean NONE.  Try ordering School of Corpses on Amazon.  Good luck with that!

If these are the writers who are in my orbit, I am curious about the private political opinions they held.  I sometimes don't know what I really think because I'm not sure which thoughts are there from indoctrination.   Forgive me, I really am rambling on and on here.

I love Schopenhauer's writing style ... Cioran too ... I tried to read Kant early in 1991.  Actually, it was only because Schopenhauer made this demand while I was reading World as Will and Representation.   If it were not for Schopenhauer, I don't think I would have gotten through The Critique of Pure Reason.

I face the fact that I am not a mental giant ... I know that whatever we say about reality is just an attempt to wrap our minds around it.  When we witness the things that the masses believe, it can be horrifying. 

I must confess that I don't really know what is meant by Kant's antimony.   I looked up the word antinomy - An elementary substance, resembling a metal in its appearance ...

To be honest, the only thing that really stuck with me from Kant is the ideality of time and space, how they are not things outside of us, but mental functions of the brain.  This way of thinking is so far beyond our everyday (scientific) way of seeing the world that we find it difficult discussing with anyone in our societies.   

Now, I think Schopenhauer understood Kant so well, as far as the ideality of space and time goes, because Schopenhauer was leaning heavily toward Buddhism, the Upanisads, and other ancient "Eastern" views of the world.  I imagine that someone with an understanding of Maya and the like would better understand the ideal nature of the phenomenal world than someone who imagined a Creator forming us out of clay or crawling out of the primal ooze over the eons ...

One demands that time has a beginning somewhere in space?

By the way, thank you for engaging me in these conversations.  Even though I admit to not having any concrete answers for you, maybe just witnessing my willingness to embrace NOT KNOWING, we might transcend this desire to explain the world.   Maybe our final solution can be a harmless form of insanity, where we merge with the irrational nature of being-in-the-world.

The world does not make any sense, and while some of our intellectual heroes might be difficult to follow, I prefer their metaphysics over those ideologies which would have me on my knees bowing in submission to the virgin-pimping Allah, the Frankenstienian savior on a stick, or the dotard of the Old Testament.

Let's face it, blasphemy just feels liberating.  Maybe one day someone will liberate my head from the neck of my body.  Then I might know what the chickens and turkeys I've devoured felt like.

If Schopenahuer and certain Eastern cosmologies are correct, then we are all one ... the Will - blind, insatiable, demonic - devouring itself ... then I am the domesticated boar that I cooked and ate with black-eyed peas.

Sorry for such a long post.  I guess I will eat some ice-cream, put down the programming book, and read ... What will I read while waiting for the Sandman to pull me into the parallel dimension?

The Schopenahuer biography or Celine's Journey to the End of the Night?

Hey, thanks for the back and forth.  Not many people are even interested in the nature of the objective world, whether the thing in itself is in fact the Will (our bodies).  We can't separate our bodies from the air, water, sun, earth.  It's all interconnected.  How can anyone not be insane?

In the Merleau-Ponty thread:

P.S.: A strange secret - I read The Critique of Pure Reason after I had finished everything by Schopenhauer. I could comprehend it quite well,despite of its reputation as a dense work.

Maybe its because of the Indian heritage of mine.

I had tried to follow Schopenhauer's instructions by reading Kant first, but it was actually only after reading Schopenhauer that Kant's main ideas became more clear to me.   I imagine you are correct in presuming that your Indian heritage made Kant's work more comprehensible.

While reading the Deladus Book of Literary Suicides, there is one case of a man killing himself after reading Kant.  He found it too difficult to accept that we are not equipped to KNOW the Thing-in-itself.

Maybe Kant's negative contribution to Western philosophy inspired many to become nihilistic.  I know nothing.   In fact, the "I" which supposedly knows things is one of the most mysterious components of all!

My own little secret is that I find Kant to be almost annoyingly tedious in his attempt to map out the structure of our mental apparatus in how we perceive the world.  I must confess that Schopenhauer interpreted Kant to me.

Schopenhauer explained to me that the philosophy/religion/mythology coming out of your area of the world, Holden, grasp the ideality of space and time, whereas the philosophy/religion/mythology of Judaism is, for the most part a historical narrative where we are "in time and space."

Maybe in India, the fact that space and time are part and parcel of our mental apparatus, that space and time are WITHIN us, is more intuitive.

note from Dead End:

1999.10.19 (edited, reworded)

While flipping through Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone last night, I had placed a bookmark at page 116 for when I had a chance to make a note of it.

I will make that note of it now.

"The Jewish faith was, in its original form, a collection of mere statutory laws upon which was established a political organization; for whatever moral additions were appended to it in no way whatever belong to Judaism as such. Judaism is really not a religion at all but merely the union of a number of people who, since they belonged to a particular stock, formed themselves into a commonwealth under purely political laws. That this political organization has a theocracy as its basis does not make it a religious organization.”

OK then.

The sly remarks made by your father are cruel.  I had graduated from university late in life, at the old age of 35!   Now, nearly two decades later, I am diligently working through the text from my senior year in high school, which totally baffled me, helping to push me over the edge into a nervous breakdown.

At my present age, what is it that motivates me to study these old textbooks (and their solution keys!)? 

I am doing as you say.  I am killing time while I wait for time to kill me.  Besides, it takes a certain degree of defiance to study mathematics just to pass the years away.   Not only that, but it is a great way to practice humility and develop some kind of patience.

If you become addicted to studying mathematics, at least it is an addiction that one might be able to afford, especially if you are lucky enough to find a set of texts (with solution keys) which you can really get into over several years.   You may even reach a point where you keep the current text near your pillow when you sleep!

Who knows how many decades will have been added to my time on earth simply due to my non-professional interest in mathematics?   It was my love for revisiting mathematical topics which allowed me to study computer science (formally) between 1995 or so and 2002.   Without its deep roots in mathematics, I do not think computer science would have inspired me in the least.



PS:  Still, some days, like today, where I have to motivate myself to write up notes and go through exercises on logarithms, well, I have to be honest, sometimes I just flat out lose interest and ask the million dollar question, "Why bother?"

This is a sign of low levels of gumption, and so maybe it is better just to scan some pages into digital format, allow myself to be depressingly reflective, and look forward to an evening of reading ... the topic of suicide fascinates me, if only because it sheds light on the fact that others have felt the need to exit in such a dramatic fashion.

In the near future, I am going to search for a good open-minded biography on Emile Cioran and his political views back in the 1940's ... The same for Louis-Ferdinand Céline.  Over the years I have been able to find and read all of Celine's novels, but none of his non-fiction.  I mean NONE.  Try ordering School of Corpses on Amazon.  Good luck with that!

For the first time in history, Louis Ferdinand Céline’s pamphlet Ecole Des Cadavres has been translated into English.

Here is the text in its entirety with an introduction by the translator, Szandor Kuragin.

Unbelievable spontaneous discovery:  School for Corpses

Introduction by the translator

There is no doubt that Louis Ferdinand Céline’s Ecole Des Cadavres is one of the darkest, most offensive and most shocking texts ever written. It is part of a series of four “pamphlets” which brutally attack prominent political figures and groups during the interwar period. Nothing in this text escapes Céline’s scathing remarks and relentless attacks. From beginning to end, the reader is confronted with anger, fear, paranoia, vulgarity and sarcasm; rarely does Céline touch on any emotion or idea which isn’t nihilistically negative or pessimistic. There is no catharsis, redeeming feature or silver lining that the reader can grasp; there is only misery, gore and intense hatred.