OK, Philosophy 201 students … I just finished my CD lecture on Schopenhauer. Arg! Pondering Schopenhauer is like sitting thru a 4 hour Wagner opera. Well, I only went to a Wagner opera once, while I was married. We left at around 10, so I can’t really say that I sat thru an entire Wagner opera. However, my marriage was a bit Wagnerian, so maybe it still counts.<\/p>\n
Anyway, back to Schopenhauer. He said some really interesting things about the unapparent similarities between aesthetic experience (beauty) and ascetic practices (solitude, fasting) — how they both help to escape the will. Aesthetic beauty helps to distract the mind from the will, but ascetic practices help to weaken it.<\/p>\n
The will is our inner reality, the “thing in itself” behind the mental illusion of our existence. But the will is conflicted and tormented. It has a death wish. As the Buddha said, it’s best to resign from the struggles in life that the will engenders.<\/p>\n
So, to sum Schopenhauer up: I will, therefore I am. I am, therefore I’m miserable. Kill will.<\/p>\n
Hey, that’s the fun of philosophy. No Polyannas allowed!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK, Philosophy 201 students … I just finished my CD lecture on Schopenhauer. Arg! Pondering Schopenhauer is like sitting thru a 4 hour Wagner opera. Well, I only went to a Wagner opera once, while I was married. We left at around 10, so I can’t really say that I sat thru an entire Wagner […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}