Santayana on Reason

"Reason, like beauty, is its own excuse for being. It is useful, indeed, for living well, when to give reason satisfaction is made the measure of good.The true philosopher, who is not one chiefly by profession, must be prepared to tread the winepress alone. He may indeed flourish like the bay-tree in a grateful environment, but more often he will rather resemble a reed shaken by the wind." 

George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Chapter 12 

A few writers I keep coming back to, Santayan, William James, Spinoza, Plato. I'm not sure why. As classical philosophers go, Aristotle is as interesting as Plato, but I find Plato's company congenial, even though I find myself disagreeing with him more often than not.

William James and Schopenhauer

The World as Will and Idea, is a world dominated by strife, by the struggle between the two terms that inhabit that world. Will and Idea are borrowed from Plato, though . . . 

For Schopenhauer, life is a matter of strife, of constant struggle between will and idea. The tragedy of this struggle, as Schopenhauer describes it is that it is a zero sum game. He tells us that “They,”  a group that includes his reader, “wish, they know what they wish, and they strive after it, with sufficient success to keep them from despair, and sufficient failure to keep them from ennui and its consequences” (422). In this struggle, neither success nor failure offers any escape, which is the eventual goal of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

While I am willing to accept Schopenhauer’s description of life as ongoing strife between will and idea, I would suggest a different interpretation of his scheme that would change a single word. I suggest we replace strife, which occurs often enough in Schopenhauer that it becomes a pivotal, or following Burke’s terminology, a “God term” with the word balance a simple enough change that immediately rewrites the world Schopenhauer describes by changing the relationships between without changing the elements at all. 

I wish to make a minor change to Schopenhauer’s terminology; actually, I cannot resist making this change. The urge comes so naturally to me that I do not pretend it comes from any philosophical or critical impulse. It is simply impulsive, irresistibly impulsive. Admitting the pathos that fuels that impulse does not place it outside the philosophical. At least I have William James to assist me in doing so.

James makes a sideways critique of philosophy’s claim to objectivity when he writes that a philosopher “trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it” (Pragmatism 8). So, yes, I want a universe that suits my temperament. And consequently, I reject a universe that suits Schopenhauer’s. Let him live in his universe and I live in [mind].

(Okay, the bracket word above is a result of spellcheck helping my clumsy fingers create a real word on the screen rather than the near-word it actually created. But, the typo works as well or better than what I wanted to write there. So, it stays.)   

What does this change do to Schopenhauer’s philosophy?

The World as Will and Idea

I have been both entranced by and disenchanted with Schopenhauer. My initial distaste focused on his conception of will and idea as being in constant struggle with each other. After that I resisted his corollary insistence that we must completely disentangle ourselves from the will to live. (How thoroughly opposed to Nietzsche, who I also have serious problems with.)

I went back and forth about whether I wished to listen to Schopenhauer's often eloquent and insightful writing, or whether I really needed to delete his LibriVox file and listen to Pandora. I stuck it out, though the last few chapters were a challenge.

Then I came to the last section, Fourth Book, Second Aspect, Paragraph 69 and 70, and it all came together. I won't attempt to explain how it does suddenly seem to neatly fit, like a *** that finally falls into place. After all, it takes Schopenhauer 515 pages to get here. Who am I to think I can summarize  him in a blog. I leave with two takeaways:

1) It has only been two days since I finished The World as Will and Idea, and I see changes in my behavior that I can only trace to this book. I will conduct two experiments: 1) I will observe my behavior and see if the changes I observe weaken or strengthen. I suspect that I will see one or the other.

2) I will eventually listen to volume two. However, most of that volume is a critique of Kant, and I suspect I do not have sufficient grounding in Kant to make that volume useful to me. My next task is to revisit Plato, going through his dialogues in chronological order. That may be useful, since Schopenhauer's philosophy, while not Platonic, has much in common with Plato. Then, Kant.

A final note: I listened to Schopenhauer's The Art of Controversy (or The Art of Being Right) which leads me to wonder how much of Schopenhauer's argument he believes, and how much he simply uses to convince his reader. This same problem crops up in Plato. 

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World As Will And Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license

Title: The World As Will And Idea (Vol. 1 of 3)

Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

Release Date: December 27, 2011 [Ebook #38427]

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-h/38427-h.html#toc15

Schopeneaur on Plato, Immitation, and the Ideal

"Pg 269 § 40. Opposites throw light upon each other, and therefore the remark may be in place here, that the proper opposite of the sublime is something which would not at the first glance be recognised, as such: the charming or attractive.

"Our view, then, cannot be reconciled with that of Plato if he is of opinion that a table or a chair express the Idea of a table or a chair (De Rep., x., pp. 284, 285, et Parmen., p. 79, ed. Bip.), but we say that they express the Ideas which are already expressed in their mere material as such. According to Aristotle (Metap. xi., chap. 3), however, Plato himself only maintained Ideas of natural objects: ὁ Πλατων εφη, ὁτι ειδη εστιν ὁποσα φυσει (Plato dixit, quod ideæ eorum sunt, quæ natura sunt), and in chap. 5 he says that, according to the Platonists, there are no Ideas of house and ring. In any case, Plato's earliest disciples, as Alcinous informs us (Introductio [pg 274]in Platonicam Philosophiam, chap. 9), denied that there were any ideas of manufactured articles.

"One would suppose that art achieved the beautiful by imitating nature. But how is the artist to recognise the perfect work which is to be imitated, and distinguish it from the failures, if he does not anticipate the beautiful before experience? And besides this, has nature ever produced a human being perfectly beautiful in all his parts."

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World As Will And Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license

Title: The World As Will And Idea (Vol. 1 of 3)

Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

Release Date: December 27, 2011 [Ebook #38427]

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-h/38427-h.html#toc15