CONCEPTS

Themes, Arguments, and Ideas

When you come down to it, we all depend on others.

I don't think there should be more gun control. I think there should be more education.

I don't think there should be more gun control. I think there should be more education.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/sambrownba792668.htm

May you ennoble your present by recapturing the joys of the past.

To Remember is to Live Again (Those precious moments)

My key to dealing with stress is simple: just stay cool and stay focused.






 

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1@ The illusory nature of free will

Man can (indeed) do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants / wills
Schopenhauer is commenting on the illusory nature of free will.

As human beings capable of rational thought and self-reflection, we imagine ourselves to have "free will," which makes us distinct from inanimate objects and animals. We believe we are masters of our own destinies, because we can choose to conform our actions to our desires (we can "do what we want").

However, if our choices are determined by our desires, then the freedom of our choices really depends on whether our desires are "free" in the first place, doesn't it? If we follow the origin of our desires to its base level, we inevitably end up at a source of action that is external to our conscious self, i.e. something we do not choose. For example, I choose to eat this sandwich because I'm hungry. But why am I hungry? Because a lack of nutrients in my body has sent a chemical signal to my brain, triggering it to want to eat. Is my choice to eat this sandwich a free one, if it is ultimately caused by biochemical events outside of my control?

A similar analysis could be applied to any chain of action and desire a person could have. Man is not truly free because he is slave to desires he has no control over; he cannot will what he wills, and thus is no more special or different from any other object in the universe.

Schopenhauer did not believe in free will, because he did not believe that we can know what we truly want. What we think we want is not the same as what we actually want (i.e. what is going to make us happy). I agree with him, however I would like to add the following:
By giving up the struggle to acquire what we think we want, and by instead focusing on appreciating and caring for what we actually have, we overcome and free ourselves from the insatiable hunger of the will. Free will is an illusion. Freedom is not.

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The Nihilism of Contemporary Europe

While most of his contemporaries looked on the late nineteenth century with unbridled optimism, confident in the progress of science and the rise of the German state, Nietzsche saw his age facing a fundamental crisis in values. With the rise of science, the Christian worldview no longer held a prominent explanatory role in people’s lives, a view Nietzsche captures in the phrase “God is dead.” However, science does not introduce a new set of values to replace the Christian values it displaces. Nietzsche rightly foresaw that people need to identify some source of meaning and value in their lives, and if they could not find it in science, they would turn to aggressive nationalism and other such salves. The last thing Nietzsche would have wanted was a return to traditional Christianity, however. Instead, he sought to find a way out of nihilism through the creative and willful affirmation of life.

The Doctrine of the Will to Power

On one level, the will to power is a psychological insight: our fundamental drive is for power as realized in independence and dominance. This will is stronger than the will to survive, as martyrs willingly die for a cause if they feel that associating themselves with that cause gives them greater power, and it is stronger than the will to sex, as monks willingly renounce sex for the sake of a greater cause. While the will to power can manifest itself through violence and physical dominance, Nietzsche is more interested in the sublimated will to power, where people turn their will to power inward and pursue self-mastery rather than mastery over others. An Indian mystic, for instance, who submits himself to all sorts of physical deprivation gains profound self-control and spiritual depth, representing a more refined form of power than the power gained by the conquering barbarian.
On a deeper level, the will to power explains the fundamental, changing aspect of reality. According to Nietzsche, everything is in flux, and there is no such thing as fixed being. Matter is always moving and changing, as are ideas, knowledge, truth, and everything else. The will to power is the fundamental engine of this change. For Nietzsche, the universe is primarily made up not of facts or things but rather of wills. The idea of the human soul or ego is just a grammatical fiction, according to Nietzsche. What we call “I” is really a chaotic jumble of competing wills, constantly struggling to overcome one another. Because change is a fundamental aspect of life, Nietzsche considers any point of view that takes reality to be fixed and objective, be it religious, scientific, or philosophical, as life denying. A truly life-affirming philosophy embraces change and recognizes in the will to power that change is the only constant in the world.

@ The Perspectivist Conception of Truth

We have art in order not to die of the truth.
https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-quote-we-have-art-in-order-not-to-die-of-the-truth-by-Friedrich-Nietzsche-mean

All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
 Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Nietzsche is critical of the very idea of objective truth. That we should think there is only one right way of considering a matter is only evidence that we have become inflexible in our thinking. Such intellectual inflexibility is a symptom of saying “no” to life, a condition that Nietzsche abhors. A healthy mind is flexible and recognizes that there are many different ways of considering a matter. There is no single truth but rather many.
At this point, interpreters of Nietzsche differ. Some argue that Nietzsche believes there is such a thing as truth but that there is no single correct perspective on it. Just as we cannot get the full picture of what an elephant is like simply by looking at its leg or looking at its tail or looking at its trunk, we cannot get a reasonable picture of any truth unless we look at it from multiple perspectives. Others, particularly those who value Nietzsche’s early essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” argue that Nietzsche believes the very idea of “truth” to be a lie. Truth is not an elephant that we must look at from multiple perspectives under this view. Rather, truth is simply the name given to the point of view of the people who have the power to enforce their point of view. The only reality is the will to power, and truth, like morality, is just another fig leaf (1) placed on top of this reality.
(1) fig. sth that you use to try to hide/cover an embarrassing fact or problema / sth shameful. Poner paños calientes.

@ The Revaluation of All Values

There Is Nothing Either Good or Bad But Thinking Makes It So

As the title of one of his books suggests, Nietzsche seeks to find a place “beyond good and evil.” One of Nietzsche’s fundamental achievements is to expose the psychological underpinnings of morality. He shows that our values are not themselves fixed and objective but rather express a certain attitude toward life. For example, he argues that Christian morality is fundamentally resentful and life denying, devaluing natural human instincts and promoting weakness and the idea of an afterlife, the importance of which supercedes that of our present life. Nietzsche’s aim is not so much to replace Christian morality with another morality. Rather, he aims to expose the very concept of morality as being a fig leaf placed on top of our fundamental psychological drives to make them seem more staid and respectable. By exposing morality as a fiction, Nietzsche wants to encourage us to be more honest about our drives and our motives and more realistic in the attitude we take toward life. Such honesty and realism, he contends, would cause a fundamental “revaluation of all values.” Without morality, we would become an entirely different species of being, and a healthier species of being at that.

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Will to Live. A key focus of Schopenhauer was his investigation of individual motivation. Before Schopenhauer, Hegel had popularized the concept of Zeitgeist, the idea that society consisted of a collective consciousness that moved in a distinct (clear to see, hear, etc, different) direction, dictating the actions of its members. Schopenhauer, a reader of both Kant and Hegel, criticized their logical optimism and the belief that individual morality could be determined by society and reason. Schopenhauer believed that humans were motivated by only their own basic desires, or Wille zum Leben ("Will to Live"), which directed all of mankind. Will, for Schopenhauer, is what Kant called the "thing-in-itself"(1). For Schopenhauer, human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human action in the world. Einstein paraphrased his views as follows: "Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants." In this sense, he adhered to the Fichtean principle of idealism: "The world is for a subject." This idealism so presented, immediately commits it to an ethical attitude, unlike the purely epistemological concerns of Descartes and Berkeley. To Schopenhauer, the Will is a blind force that controls not only the actions of individual, intelligent agents, but ultimately all observable phenomena—an evil to be terminated via mankind's duties: asceticism and chastity. He is credited with one of the most famous opening lines of philosophy: "The world is my representation." Friedrich Nietzsche was greatly influenced by this idea of Will, although he eventually rejected it.

(1) The reality as it is apart from experience. The intellectual conception of a thing as it is in itself, not as it is known through perception.

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Collective consciousness The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own.
Various forms of what might be termed "collective consciousness" in modern societies have been identified by other sociologists, such as Mary Kelsey, going from solidarity attitudes and memes to extreme behaviors like group-think, herd behavior, or collectively shared experiences during collective rituals and dance parties.^[9][10] Mary Kelsey, sociology lecturer in the University of California, Berkeley, used the term in the early 2000s to describe people within a social group, such as mothers, becoming aware of their shared traits and circumstances, and as a result acting as a community and achieving solidarity. Rather than existing as separate individuals, people come together as dynamic groups to share resources and knowledge. It has also developed as a way of describing how an entire community comes together to share similar values. This has also been termed "hive mind", "group mind", "mass mind", and "social mind".^[11]

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Cheerful Despair. Democritus did not believe that he had to feel constantly sad to prove that he recognised life to be sad. He danced every now and then because of a rightful confidence that he had already done justice, and would always in the future fully do justice, to the sadness of things.
Democritus was aiming at a more enduring, reliable kind of cheerfulness that admits from the outset that life is fundamentally grim but that uses this despair as a catalyst for a more vivid engagement with whatever cheerful detail comes one’s way, like an English person who is especially adept at drawing value from the last day of summer or a condemned man who perfectly savours the last meal before facing the firing squad.
Once we have acquired the skill of Cheerful Despair, a new range of possibilities for pleasure open themselves up to us. We will be amazed and so touched when, once in awhile, someone seems to understand a few things we mean, appears to like us, or invites us to go to bed with them. We will find it hard to believe, but will be delighted, that our bodies are not yet splintering or ceding the way to malignant cells.

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Microcosm, (from Greek mikros kosmos, “little world”), a Western philosophical term designating man as being a “little world” in which the macrocosm, or universe, is reflected. The ancient Greek idea of a world soul (e.g., in Plato) animating the universe had as a corollary the idea of the human body as a miniature universe animated by its own soul. The notion of the microcosm dates, in Western philosophy, from Socratic times (Democritus specifically referred to it)—i.e., from the 5th century bc.

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Superman, German Übermensch, in philosophy, the superior man, who justifies the existence of the human race. “Superman” is a term significantly used by Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly in Also sprach Zarathustra (1883–85), although it had been employed by J.W. von Goethe and others. This superior man would not be a product of long evolution; rather, he would emerge when any man with superior potential completely masters himself and strikes off conventional Christian “herd morality” to create his own values, which are completely rooted in life on this earth. Nietzsche was not forecasting the brutal superman of the German Nazis, for his goal was a “Caesar with Christ’s soul.” George Bernard Shaw popularized the term “superman” in his play Man and Superman (1903).

In the nineteenth century, philosophers were influenced by the theories of Charles Darwin, believing, for example, in what Henri Bergson called an elan vital, or Vital Force, that worked in and through Nature, pushing things ever upward. But most philosophers rejected the more troubling moral implications of evolution—namely, the Law of the Jungle. They believed in Progress but ethically were still Christians.

Nietzsche was the exception (, embracing the idea that life was for the fit, not the unfit. He believed that the meek will most definitely not inherit the Earth.
He is at once the most readable and most disturbing of all the great philosophers. Today we would call him politically incorrect. He is highly quotable. Here are just a few of his gems. In my view, these lose nothing in translation but translate from German into English beautifully:

Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
If you look into the abyss long enough, the abyss looks into you.
All things are subject to interpretation. Which interpretation prevails is a matter of power, not truth.
Goest thou to woman? Forget not thy whip!
The Will to Power.
God is dead.

Clearly, he is at odds with religion. He is sometimes seen as a gloomy, militaristic figure. And yet he is often surprisingly life-affirming, with beautiful quotes such as this:

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

The real meaning of Nietzsche’s philosophy is hotly debated to this day, and the controversies are many. Was he a radical, reactionary, anarchist, or monarchist? One thing is certain: He was very popular in mid-twentieth-century Germany.

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The will to power. A basic element in Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the "will to power" (der Wille zur Macht), which he maintained provides a basis for understanding human behavior—more so than competing explanations, such as the ones based on pressure for adaptation or survival.^{[151][152][153]} As such, according to Nietzsche, the drive for conservation appears as the major motivator of human or animal behavior only in exceptions, as the general condition of life is not one of emergency, of 'struggle for existence'.^[154] More often than not, self-conservation is but a consequence of a creature's will to exert its strength on the outside world.
In presenting his theory of human behavior, Nietzsche also addressed, and attacked, concepts from philosophies popularly embraced in his days, such as Schopenhauer's notion of an aimless will or that of utilitarianism. Utilitarians claim that what moves people is mainly the desire to be happy, to accumulate pleasure in their lives. But such a conception of happiness Nietzsche rejected as something limited to, and characteristic of, the bourgeois lifestyle of the English society,^[155] and instead put forth the idea that happiness is not an aim per se—it is instead a consequence of a successful pursuit of one's aims, of the overcoming of hurdles to one's actions—in other words, of the fulfillment of the will.^[

From the intro to my copy of Thus Spoke... by Kathleen Higgins and Robert Solomon: "...[the will to power] is creative, not merely controlling, and that it represents self-mastery, not just power over others...With the will to power, Nietzsche advocates an appreciation of life with all of its 'overcomings' as it exists within us and outside us, in its exuberance and excess...life involves suffering, much of which stems from conflict...[Nietzsche] insists that we can make the most of suffering by our willing participation in the world. Far from pointless...life is joyful and well worth the price of suffering."
In this way it also ties in with his Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, as the Ubermensch, possessing true will to power would will that his life recur exactly as it has over and over for all eternity (evil demon example from The Gay Science)

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Existential Nihilism. While nihilism is often discussed in terms of extreme skepticism and relativism, for most of the 20th century it has been associated with the belief that life is meaningless. Existential nihilism begins with the notion that the world is without meaning or purpose. Given this circumstance, existence itself--all action, suffering, and feeling--is ultimately senseless and empty.

Because miseries vastly outnumber pleasures, happiness is impossible, the philosopher argues, and subsequently advocates suicide. Centuries later during the Renaissance, William Shakespeare eloquently summarized the existential nihilist's perspective when, in this famous passage near the end of Macbeth, he has Macbeth pour out his disgust for life:

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

In the twentieth century, it's the atheistic existentialist movement, popularized in France in the 1940s and 50s, that is responsible for the currency of existential nihilism in the popular consciousness. Jean-Paul Sartre's (1905-1980) defining preposition for the movement, "existence precedes essence," rules out any ground or foundation for establishing an essential self or a human nature. When we abandon illusions, life is revealed as nothing; and for the existentialists, nothingness is the source of not only absolute freedom but also existential horror and emotional anguish. Nothingness reveals each individual as an isolated being "thrown" into an alien and unresponsive universe, barred forever from knowing why yet required to invent meaning. It's a situation that's nothing short of absurd. Writing from the enlightened perspective of the absurd, Albert Camus (1913-1960) observed that Sisyphus' plight, condemned to eternal, useless struggle, was a superb metaphor for human existence (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942).