11-27-2017, 12:00 AM
Julio Juliopolis wrote:
Le_Regard wrote:
This is very substantial.
What you're describing as the combined intent of apple, tree, earth, etc., etc., Schopenhauer called "will". He wrote a book about it, in German, called "The World as Will and Idea" or "The World as Will and Representation". Or whatever the German for that is, I don't really know.
Two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule combine in true love and ecstasy because it is their will to be water. I'm assuming the Carlos Castaneda books have been translated into German, but I don't know the word they use for Intent, so I don't know... maybe it's the same thing.
But Schopenhauer's "Will" doesn't just inspire hydrogen and oxygen to be water. Will is "the thing-in-itself", "das ding an sich" if you like. Schopenhauer writes this way because in the philosophy of KANT, we only know our own experiences. We definitely know that a world is out there a real one, at least ONE real thing or maybe real THINGS, because we don't know. We can't know. But we know it as a brute fact because otherwise it would be like seeing a shadow cast by a tree but not believing in trees and not believing in the Sun. That's what Kant says. We know it's there because we infer from its effects, which is the fact we experience ANYTHING AT ALL. And blahblahblah Space is just the absolute form of geometry and Time is just the absolute form of arithmetic and blahblahblah, but what's relevant here is that Schopenhauer was a bit more optimistic and thought that, in a certain sense, we COULD know the the thing-in-itself, quite directly, because it is Will, and we have that. We are that.
Very interesting. I haven't read Schopenhauer or Kant but I find it curious that they were still into imagined shapes being more "real" than the approximations of them we actually find in the world. I'd have guessed that idea, (although once a popular notion), would have died not long after Plato. That aside, the idea of will as a thing-in-itself needs a bit more explanation for me to get it though as I can imagine several different ways that could be interpreted. I've never thought of will that way myself before.
However, Schopenhauer's project is generally considered pessimistic. The only way to realize the Will of the universe is to basically suspend the individual Will that animates our own lives only.
If that means what I think it does than I don't see why it would be pessimistic. Perhaps people should try taking it in chunks. Instead of dropping one's will entirely, just take a short vacation from it. Take a few days and let your decisions be governed by authentic desires only. That's how the universe communicates it's will to us, (maybe xD). If you feel a genuine desire to eat, then eat. If you feel a specific craving eat that, if not find something. If you want to watch TV, watch TV. If you find you no longer have a desire to keep watching TV, (even if it's right in the middle of a show!), then stop. Don't continue doing stuff from habit, that just leads to dullness and boredom. When you find someone is going to interact with you don't approach it with your assumptions about how they'll behave, trying to manipulate the situation to encourage or avoid certain actions by them, instead just see what your authentic desire says when you see them and go with that. It may be scary to think about trying to live your life like that, but it should be okay for a weekend. In fact, it would make that weekend both interesting and entertaining.
We know the world by "willing it" to appearance or representation. So if we just DON'T... if we just suspend all appearance and representation, "stop the world" if you like, stop THINKING the world into appearance, WILL shines out as self-illuminated. But that doesn't leave us anywhere.
I'll have to take your word for it, as I haven't stopped the world enough times to know and my memories of the events tend to go up to the point where I stopped the world and pick up immediately after I "started" a world.
Related... I heard this on the radio this morning.
It's not correct to say that Kant thought imagined shapes are more real than the approximations we find of them in the world. I'm not even sure Plato thought that.
This is important actually. All of Plato that we have is in dialogue form. It's basically theater. We know what he made his characters say, and we can't ever know what he really thought himself. He may have had reasons for writing Socrates the way he did other than history accuracy.
But for Kant, we just DON'T KNOW. The highest standard of reality is just an unknowable thing, and we only know its appearances. But also... and I might mess this up a bit because translating Kant into Carlos Castaneda's world is not that easy, but the basic idea is that we CAN know with some certainty the WAYS that we assemble all these appearances into something like a reality. Logic and math are involved in this, the creation of concepts is involved in this, fancy words like "the transcendental aesthetic of space and time" are involved in this, but this is very roughly Kant's version of the Platonic forms. We can kind of sort of "know how we know", and at least know what we can know and can't know, even if we can't ever prove we know anything.
For Kant's it's like every one of us are this beautiful intellectual machine, all basically the same in the broad sense that 2+2=4 and the measure of the interior angles of a triangle will always equal the measure of two right angles, always, no matter who you are or what kind of experiences you've had. But this beautiful machine doesn't DO anything until experience happens. Until phenomena appear. And then the machine gets spun into motion connecting all these phenomena and.... generating the world, more or less.
But why you generate a world out of X stream of phenomena and I have to generate it out of Y, I don't know. But it does appear to me that many, very many people, are experiencing streams of phenomena such that no, they can't just take a VACATION whenever they want to.
The world is full of people and animals that very often "feel a genuine desire to eat" and can't just go to a restaurant and fix it.
I was only 10 seconds into that video when I immediately thought of this one, by the way.
Stop the world and melt with whom? It's not enough... it will never be enough until we melt the whole thing. But that's not practical, usually, and in any case, probably the gods choose the shapes they do for a reason.
Le_Regard wrote:
This is very substantial.
What you're describing as the combined intent of apple, tree, earth, etc., etc., Schopenhauer called "will". He wrote a book about it, in German, called "The World as Will and Idea" or "The World as Will and Representation". Or whatever the German for that is, I don't really know.
Two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule combine in true love and ecstasy because it is their will to be water. I'm assuming the Carlos Castaneda books have been translated into German, but I don't know the word they use for Intent, so I don't know... maybe it's the same thing.
But Schopenhauer's "Will" doesn't just inspire hydrogen and oxygen to be water. Will is "the thing-in-itself", "das ding an sich" if you like. Schopenhauer writes this way because in the philosophy of KANT, we only know our own experiences. We definitely know that a world is out there a real one, at least ONE real thing or maybe real THINGS, because we don't know. We can't know. But we know it as a brute fact because otherwise it would be like seeing a shadow cast by a tree but not believing in trees and not believing in the Sun. That's what Kant says. We know it's there because we infer from its effects, which is the fact we experience ANYTHING AT ALL. And blahblahblah Space is just the absolute form of geometry and Time is just the absolute form of arithmetic and blahblahblah, but what's relevant here is that Schopenhauer was a bit more optimistic and thought that, in a certain sense, we COULD know the the thing-in-itself, quite directly, because it is Will, and we have that. We are that.
Very interesting. I haven't read Schopenhauer or Kant but I find it curious that they were still into imagined shapes being more "real" than the approximations of them we actually find in the world. I'd have guessed that idea, (although once a popular notion), would have died not long after Plato. That aside, the idea of will as a thing-in-itself needs a bit more explanation for me to get it though as I can imagine several different ways that could be interpreted. I've never thought of will that way myself before.
However, Schopenhauer's project is generally considered pessimistic. The only way to realize the Will of the universe is to basically suspend the individual Will that animates our own lives only.
If that means what I think it does than I don't see why it would be pessimistic. Perhaps people should try taking it in chunks. Instead of dropping one's will entirely, just take a short vacation from it. Take a few days and let your decisions be governed by authentic desires only. That's how the universe communicates it's will to us, (maybe xD). If you feel a genuine desire to eat, then eat. If you feel a specific craving eat that, if not find something. If you want to watch TV, watch TV. If you find you no longer have a desire to keep watching TV, (even if it's right in the middle of a show!), then stop. Don't continue doing stuff from habit, that just leads to dullness and boredom. When you find someone is going to interact with you don't approach it with your assumptions about how they'll behave, trying to manipulate the situation to encourage or avoid certain actions by them, instead just see what your authentic desire says when you see them and go with that. It may be scary to think about trying to live your life like that, but it should be okay for a weekend. In fact, it would make that weekend both interesting and entertaining.
We know the world by "willing it" to appearance or representation. So if we just DON'T... if we just suspend all appearance and representation, "stop the world" if you like, stop THINKING the world into appearance, WILL shines out as self-illuminated. But that doesn't leave us anywhere.
I'll have to take your word for it, as I haven't stopped the world enough times to know and my memories of the events tend to go up to the point where I stopped the world and pick up immediately after I "started" a world.
Related... I heard this on the radio this morning.
It's not correct to say that Kant thought imagined shapes are more real than the approximations we find of them in the world. I'm not even sure Plato thought that.
This is important actually. All of Plato that we have is in dialogue form. It's basically theater. We know what he made his characters say, and we can't ever know what he really thought himself. He may have had reasons for writing Socrates the way he did other than history accuracy.
But for Kant, we just DON'T KNOW. The highest standard of reality is just an unknowable thing, and we only know its appearances. But also... and I might mess this up a bit because translating Kant into Carlos Castaneda's world is not that easy, but the basic idea is that we CAN know with some certainty the WAYS that we assemble all these appearances into something like a reality. Logic and math are involved in this, the creation of concepts is involved in this, fancy words like "the transcendental aesthetic of space and time" are involved in this, but this is very roughly Kant's version of the Platonic forms. We can kind of sort of "know how we know", and at least know what we can know and can't know, even if we can't ever prove we know anything.
For Kant's it's like every one of us are this beautiful intellectual machine, all basically the same in the broad sense that 2+2=4 and the measure of the interior angles of a triangle will always equal the measure of two right angles, always, no matter who you are or what kind of experiences you've had. But this beautiful machine doesn't DO anything until experience happens. Until phenomena appear. And then the machine gets spun into motion connecting all these phenomena and.... generating the world, more or less.
But why you generate a world out of X stream of phenomena and I have to generate it out of Y, I don't know. But it does appear to me that many, very many people, are experiencing streams of phenomena such that no, they can't just take a VACATION whenever they want to.
The world is full of people and animals that very often "feel a genuine desire to eat" and can't just go to a restaurant and fix it.
I was only 10 seconds into that video when I immediately thought of this one, by the way.
Stop the world and melt with whom? It's not enough... it will never be enough until we melt the whole thing. But that's not practical, usually, and in any case, probably the gods choose the shapes they do for a reason.