A few words about the philosophers
Arthur Schopenhauer and Fredrick Nietzsche. Each was a philosophical pessimist
of a sort. Their pessimism resulted not only from the tough social times of the
late 19th century-an era for individuals quite a lot more painful than first
world living today, it was a consequence of the lack of faith of a time with
the rise of evolution as a populist theory and liberation movements that
required a revolt against the power of a property owning church hierarchy
over-associated internationally with royalty and royal land grants. That
history from Imperial Russia to Maryland of the American colonies prompted even
Immanuel Kant toward the concept of sapere aude-'dare to know (to be wise). He
wrote an essay criticizing social reliance upon authorities for their thinking
such that people were in never ending tutelage.
Many avenues of
ingress to wisdom and egress from folly can be developed by any individual or
social elite obviously. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche choose
philosophical-religious dualism of different varieties in order to develop a
personal worldview explaining reality physically and socially. Each philosopher
combined ideas from ancient Persian religions such as Zoroastrianism and the
sky religions of the Vedas of India that initially arose in
Afghanistan/Iran/Arya. The synthesis of old and newer ideas aloud a metaphysics
and morality to exist in one wrong dualistic belief system for each.
Schopenhauer
believed something like Buddhists that the existence of the Universe is
basically wrong, or an error of some sort. One might think that it is an
emanation from God perhaps that emerged through error. I tend too think that
God doesn't make metaphysical errors though and would not credit the idea
much.
With the belief
that the Universe is a mistake it is easy to find the concept that humanity is
fundamentally wicked. Schopenhauer was readily able to derive some kind of idea
of a misogynist character of course and thought like many of the ancients that
the X chromosome half of the human organic system is an inferior or wicked
evolution as a punishment for prior sin perhaps. There are a variety of reasons
why the ancients believed that women needed to be regarded as a problem.
Perhaps the Muslim ideas about women are derived from that ancient concept.
Original sin might
have inspired Schopenhauer too. I believe with Augustine about original sin,
yet place the context not only as manifest because of the divine insight of the
Bible. Original sin may be the context of organic existence in a Higgs Field
with entropy in the solid-state phase with a time arrow. People naturally
consume instead of living forever in the Garden of non-temporal existence
without any need to eat apples or anything else. In a realm of forms the tree of
knowledge and the tree of life are not necessary. Time also is an element of
temporality and solid-state changes.
Nietzsche was a
dualist too. With a Christian heritage he lost faith when his father died at an
early age. The eternal recurrence of the Universe was his idea, and he named
his philosopher alter ego in his books Zarathustra. In 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'
a philosopher living as a hermit on a hill looking down on a village chews a
philosophical cud about the meaningless morals of the people living there that
aren't aware that everything in the Universe recurs exactly as it is
infinitely. There is a good science fiction book with that kind of experience
being an extra-dimensional account of hell. Everyone is wicked in that place
though it starts out nice, and it becomes an amoral killing field of criminals
that gets run down and eventually burned down and then it starts all over again
new.
Nietzsche obviously
had a little of Kant's sapere aude spirit about him, and Schopenhauer's 'The
Fourfold Roots of Reason' is about as good of a follow up to Kant's 'Prolegumena
to Any Future Metaphysics' as might have been written. Schopenhauer though is
such an egoist, and ultimately a pessimist because of his ideas about the
nature of the world-Universe that the analysis about reason seems meaningless.
Both philosophers were 19th century Germans in a tradition of great German
philosophers such as Hegel and Kant. It wasn't easy to produce works of equal
gravity as those of Kant and Hegel, and neither did though each made quite an
effort.
Nietzsche is more
of a romantic and irrationalist by default because his work lacks interest in
technical logic. Schopenhauer could have been a good logician, yet he writes as
technically as did Sartre in 'Being and Nothingness' later with the difference
that Schopenhauer appends his dualist metaphysics on to his analysis and of course
Sartre didn't append anything on to his analysis of subjective experience.
I suppose there are
several varieties of dualism possible. One can construct a two-part metaphysics
or a two part temporal description of reality. If physical reality in solid-state
entangled quanta is what is experienced one can always say that a different,
deeper level underlies that. Even the Higgs field content could be said to be
an idea developed from the will of God. Dualism in philosophy is possible in
many explanations of why the world is the way it is.
Marxist dialectical
material is a kind of dualism. The thesis and anti-thesis might be applied to
Republican and Democrat politics in Congress today. Like Marxism we might think
that leads to economic nihilism and vast public debt rather than utopia. It is
easy to be pessimist within any dualist progression dialectically leading
nowhere good.
If evolution is a
proximal way of describing a particular indeterminist view of biological life
rather than of the determinism of phase changes of quanta in a Higgs or other
field following various inevitable patterns, it is within a select reduced
range of regard for biological change within the greater Higgs field and its
properties described with a field theory. Change occurs within determined,
quantifiable order at a given level in a hierarchy of scale instead of within a
unified system breaking from monism to pluralism and back again.
A monistic system
tends to become pluralist because of change and entropy rather than vice versa.
The reversibility in theory of the physical contents of time would seemingly
require more energy to reorder in a reverse direction than in the naturally
breaking down direction. Even biological life converting energy into order does
so with a determined level of direction and inertial progress difficult to
change. It is an interesting paradox that rational thought is the better tool
for altering the physical determined content of a given physical system. That
is also a danger environmentally speaking.
Human thought and
creativity have changed the natural evolution of the Earth ecosphere in order
to provide a more comfortable existence. Disrupting the natural evolution
requires rational response and correction if human life is to continue for
long. That sort of creativity and applied physics through economic change needs
a somewhat monistic outlook of education tolerant of individualism yet
instructive in the effect of intelligent thought and artifice on an ecosphere
of natural, deterministic evolution.
When God booted
Adam and Eve out of the Garden toward a world where through a light switch
would change night in to day the problems of changing the natural evolution
with intelligent thought in pursuit of the tree of knowledge and the tree of
life were bound to occur. Maybe it's an I.Q. and faith test simultaneously
presented to determine if reason can be reasonable enough to overcome the
natural destruction of the natural ecosphere. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer did
the best they could at considering the deeper meaning of life. All they found
though was the easy to arrive at position of pessimism.
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