History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Schopenhauer
And The Caveman Buddhas
Schopenhauer, minus his rightwing latencies (which have nothing to do with his transcendental idealism, which he got from the liberal/leftist Kant), would make a better foundation for the New Atheists than the Nietzsche is always present but never mentioned by members of that cult.
Neither Darwinism nor ID will ever be real science, but ID could be a metaphysical view of nature, but only for post-Christians.
Perhaps a variant of Schopenhauer on the ‘will’ could do the job for the ID gang, or those of lapsed Xtian faith.
We have already linked today to: An Agnostic Manifesto, but the essay is worth reading.
I was often over time ‘a sort of atheist’ without realizing it, and this position was really closer to agnosticism than atheism. With the arrival of the New Atheists, vacating the atheist position becomes an necessity since this cultic brand is highly intolerant and contains an entire bible of related beliefs.
The problem is that, philosophically, theism can revinvent itself constantly in ever new guises, in a manner that, while not truly convincing, is dialectically alive. Much atheism arises from the silliness and infantile deterioration of theism into a degenerated theism. A spate of atheism is often a negation of this perverted theism, and as such healthy for the mind.
But the real idea of ‘god’ is not so simply dismissed because it is not so simply defined. And very powerful antinomies of reason, as clearly portrayed by Kant, haunt both the affirmation and/or negation of ‘god’.
This often takes the form of the antinomies of the beginning in time/no beginning in time (The manifesto linked to has a version of this in its question about creating something from nothing).
The mind will be like a dog chasing its tail as it wobbles between theism and atheism. The search to still the mind might be found in an agnostic position.
Beyond that, the transcendental idealism of Kant, seemingly theistic in the case of the latter, and atheistic (or agnostic) in his great successor Schopenhauer, gives us the truest ground for agnosticism, contra Kant, in its reminder that the noumenal is beyond knowing, behind the phenomenal. We cannot ‘know god’ (save that ‘gnostics’ in another sense do so claim) either as a positive or a negative.
Unfortunately Kant muddied his position by reintroducing a redefined version of ‘faith’ to posit an ‘atheist’s redefined god’ somewhere in the vicinity of his ethical discourses. Schopenhauer in a way swept all this aside in his streamlined agnostic transcendental idealism. One problem is that Schopenhauer is almost Buddhist in his strain of pessimism and his concealed metaphysics of the will. But, whatever the case, the great insight into transcendental idealism starting with Kant reminds us that agnosticism confronts the noumenon as it is.
Transcendental idealism, despite its confusing and misleading name which doesn’t mean what it seems, is a highly useful non-belief system constructed as an extension/commentary to Newtonian physics and is highly adaptable to a modified science.
Again, the question of ‘god’ is never simple. Note that the Israelites did not use this word, but instead IHVH, as something to point to beyond simple theism.
No self-respecting professor of philosophy wants to discuss the soul in class. It reeks of old-time theology, or, worse, New Age quantum treacle. The soul has been a dead end in philosophy ever since the positivists unmasked its empty referential center. Scientific philosophy has shown us that there’s no there there.
This article, in the Chronicle of Higher Education no less, is a revealing snapshot of the way that scientism has overtaken philosophy and destroyed it.
If anyone wants to argue against the ‘soul’, that is one thing, but to speak as a philosopher with such overconfidence, and to a class of students, is shocking, and a reminder that scientism is killing off the universities.
I have many problems with ‘soul’ philosophies, but, all in all, the issue of soul won’t go away, and hasn’t been touched even by postivists and, laugh all you want here, their ‘scientific philosophy’.
Has this professor never read Kant?
The best way to see the danger of negating soul is to read a philosopher like Schopenhauer who had little patience with religious soul verbiage but who reinvented ‘soul’ beliefs all over again in his manner of discussing transcendental idealism, in the wake of Kant: if out categories of perception are the source of the space-time matrix then it follows that some part of the mind stands beyond space and time. Even if this Kantian, and then Schopenhauerian, logic is flawed, it should remind us that ‘soul’ beliefs are their own worst enemy and veil the reality, which is that they can revive in the twinkling of an eye, most prodigiously via the unwitting efforts of great philosophers.
Schopenhauer on death
But the issue here in a Kantian vein is not arguing for the existence of soul so much as realizing that the noumenal aspect of mind is lost to the students of empiricist dogma. We cannot prove anything about soul, one way or the other.
This article goes off on the tangents of junk talk on ‘soul’. But that is pointless.
And it also shows the way, visible in the depiction of his students, that soul beliefs in all their confusion are naturally endemic and a normal aspect of human evolutionary psychology. They cannot and should not be excised. Instead one can try to rescue them from confusion.
MBFM raises the issue of the right ‘Buddhist dharma’ to pursue in the modern world. Original Buddhism is so elegant and simple that the steps would seem transparent, but they are not. Westerners rarely succeed at meditation, while Indians seem to know it all first hand. Deepak Chopra talks a good game, but he knows he is an idiot, and, running scared, gets up to meditate two hours a day in fine Indian style. I don’t recommend that or anything one way or the other, you can’t imitate such people, you are not an Indian, but consider the confusion of the situation.
The tradition as received is not really accurate history anymore, and the techniques may fail on a modern body type. I have seen one person from the New Age who spent five years trying to learn to sit in full lotus, and failing in disgust, to abandon sadhana forever. Rare is the westerner who can do that. Who cares. Sit with legs loose on in half lotus or nothing. Don’t be distracted by such nonsense. That’s a good example of the way the obvious will fail, when it is so ancient. Yet Buddhism has a truly modern tone to its core. What a pity. Many Buddhists have understood this and the prophesy of the new Buddha have been many, only to result in a thorgoughly hopeless idiocy of pretenders. Many ancients Buddhists, and Tibetans, saw the new age effect, but their solution isn’t destined to succeed.
I should note that Schopenhauer produced a good part of the answer to translating the issues into modern thought two centuries ago at the dawn of the New Age movement, which he witnessed. It is a reminder that few really understand ancient sutras, even those born in Tibet or India. As the sufis say, the tradition is not reborn in time, but beyond time, verbiage with a point, in their sugary mystical language. But be wary of Schopenhauer: it was not his intention to create a religion or a spiritual path. You can also get hung up on his metaphysical slant. He, and Kant, simply clarified the language of spirituality, lost to most traditionalists, and certainly to most, all!, Christians, who try to get sustenance from religious propaganda of the late Roman empire.
I should note that James, a earlier frequent commenter here, was often prone to links to various Buddhist groups from Thailand, the Hinayana stronghold.
I can’t really advise anyone here, save to note that the pitfalls pointed to at The Gurdjieff Con are horrific. But that way is vital and still alive. Almost.
The answer to these questions is comically simple: the Hinduism/Buddhism/Jainism of the Axial Age were already recreations of ancient lost teachings, and got many things wrong. But they did succeed in producing a new cycle. Modernity can do the same. But it is not a question of New Age reactionaries destroying modernity.
Modern man is a different body type. Try this: if you are allergic to meditation try meditating five minutes or so a day for two years. An absurd exercise, but if the alternative is nothing, then… And the alternative is almost always nothing for Westerners. Five minutes a day is a steady reminder that you are not meditating, or are you? It forces the issue of what mediation is. Don’t discuss it with people. This is also good if you are busy in modernity. You can’t graft meditation onto modernity armed with New Age cliches. You don’t have an hour a day to spare from the prison of the modern economy. Take five minutes a day, something that can succeed, to reflect on you situation in a sitting posture. One day the right way to proceed will appear to you, willy nilly. There are many variants to this procedure. Five minutes is hardly meditation, whatever that is, but what is, and this is a ‘good question’, as they say, in you existence, one that is absent from many of the fashionable New Age meditation retreats that make a mechanical hodgepodge of meditation.
That five minutes will remain a good question, spare you wasted time on psedo meditative gymastics, and induce a slowly rising panic that your life has been a waste, so long sucker. Then you can hopefully proceed to something real. As real, maybe, as meditating five minutes a day.
After that you can order a five ton Shiva Lingam like the kind in Jain temples for your back yard from India. With its economy booming the way it is you can probably have one shipped UPS. Cash or creditcard, maybe even via the Internet. It can be a real come on for your Tantrik path, the successor to your five minute good question phase.
A far better starting point is to reflect on the self-consciousness behind your ordinary consciousness. That is the real point, along with the arduous task of coming to understand your human software, a very difficult thing to do. It is sad but we usually spend 90% of our life trying to understand our human software, and then barely succeed. But it need not be hard. It is not however a puzzle you can solve by thinking about it.
You cannot get it from current scientific psychology, and you cannot get it from Christianizing religion, and you cannot easily get it from the sutras of antiquity, but the odds improve. That’s often the key to meditation, don’t know, just sit and wait.
All you can do is reflect on consciousness, will, and the power of attention, and look at the way that Nature in its strange wisdom has planted a spiritiual (bad word, wrong word) path dead center in modernity, built around the question of your self-consciousness, an evanescent state momentarily real in the act of attention. That’s it, the whole sutra.
A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
I am not a guru, and don’t propose anything, but the ground of self-consciousness is the universal ground of human evolution, an invariant at all times and places, and religions have no monopoly on it, if they have any connection to it at all. Ancient men at the dawn of human speciation must have had the first taste of it, perhaps even stronger that what is common in modern men. In that sense man as man is what he always was, strangely stuck between two worlds, with a mysterious software that has flowered in uncommon times and places. Alfred Wallace came to understand something of this and quite briskly trotted away from his original view of evolutiion (which Darwin plagiarized).
In the issue of self-consciousness secularism is the ground for a truer higher religious non-religion of the future.
Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present
by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York
We just discussed the book on Gould by the same two authors who wrote the book above: we have commented here at length on that book, use the search box.
It is an interesting book, but the emphasis on ‘materialism’ is bit passe at this point (as is the design arugment). After all we have had a century of QM (what to say of even more time with electromagnetid field theory), the emphasis on materialism is a ghost from the nineteenth century positivists.
The issue of evolution is not materialism versus design.
Marxists crippled themselves with materialism in the generation of Marx, even as Schopenhauer without religious obsessions produced a version of transcendentalism idealism that would have served Marx better. Marx’s thinking was downright clumsy by comparison.
To be sure Schopenhauer has surface problems in this work that drive people away, surface problems. He ended with a metaphysics of the will, which is odd, or is it right on?
We can see exactly what is missing from evolutionism, stuck in its material reductionism. It is Ok to make the same charge in reverse for Schopenhauer’s idealism, but the point is our suspicion that just as classical physics was resolved with force fields (gravity the first) so…., so we are not sure, but it would seem that a ‘force field’ construct must be involved in the paradoxes of evolution. That may be off, but the fact is that something much more complex than material processes is involved in the processes of development. It is hard to avoid this kind of thinking when you look at the real processes of evolution seen in world history.
Schopenhauer and Kant are much better than simple idealism, which is different. In any case, there is no victor in the dialectic of materialism and idealism. Why did that enter into Marxist fundamentalism, only to confuse the left for over a century. A more sophisticated dialectic would have served better.
Material issues are inescapable, but so are ‘idea’ issues as Schopenhauer understood well, with his artificial and preposterous but cogent annexation of the ‘Platonic ideas’ into his thinking.
You can’t reduce ideas to material forces (or vice versa)>
I keep reciting this post (one of the most popular in the whole history of the blog):
The question of soul is rendered chaotic due to the word itself, and it can help to see how easy it is to create a better understanding of the ‘soul’ question: Schopenhauer on death
Schopenhauer didn’t really believe in ‘souls’, but the framework of transcendental idealism shows how the issue can be resolved with a different understanding of the categories of mind, and the space/time framework, as a categorical construct.
See also:
Visions of a Ghostseer
Comment on Schopenhauer and death
jim buck said,
January 13, 2010 at 7:10 pm ·
‘Schopenhauer’s perspective, or rather that of his transcendental idealism, is not about a soul or reincarnation, but a framework that stands beyond representation, related to the framework of will. That is not a psyche. ‘I confess to never having read Schopenhauer, and so ask your tolerance for what might seem a daft question i.e. How can his perspective have any validity if the framework, referred to, stands beyond representation? Is it a matter of him feeling, in the dark, something he takes for a leg and inferring that the leg must belong to an elephant?
It is unfair to Schopenhauer to graft our views onto his philosophy, but the process is perhaps inevitable.
Basically, the question Schopenhaur posits of reprensentation and the thing-in-itself enters indirectly into afterlife beliefs, without his ever raising the issue at all.
The reason is that the categories of space and time are an aspect of our representations of the world. Thus the aspect of the ‘thing-in-itself’ beyond representation is not within space and time, as far as we know. It is never stated quite in Schopenhauer or Kant that the implications of this are profound: space and time are constructs of our minds (but, in Kant, still have external reality) and therefore something in us must be beyond space and time.
In general, the approach of Schopenhauer can help those in post-religious secular culture grapple with issues that the traditions of religion deal with (and mostly scramble into corrupt versions of no use to anyone).
The question of how Schopenhauer arrives at transcendental idealism is complex, and might be approached historically. With Kant the issues revolve around complex ‘transcendental deductions’ that can be very confusing. Schopenhauer drops all of that and simply affirms his version of TI as direct insight.
Lucky are those who can arrive at a spontaneous understanding in the same fashion.
I think that transcendental idealism should be in the mental toolkit of all scientists, as an corrective to scientism. But, sadly, that has not happened.
Comment on post on atheists and reincarnation
Very interesing quote.
But I think that reincarnation far predates Hinduism (of the post-Vedic brand), and goes back many millennia before.
The question is thus often made to seem a mystical belief or a religious tenet, when in fact it should be a deduction about the self beyond space and time: Schopenhauer’s thinking is the clearest example (the more convincing since he never in his wildest thoughts considered reincarnation)
Check out his popular post here in the archives:
http://darwiniana.com/2009/11/07/schopenhauer-on-death/
With respect to the Biocentrism question, and also of the Goswami/Chopra idea of consciousness as fundamental, I wrote a post last spring when the book Biocentrism first came to our attention here: Matter, life, consciousness
This post was too harsh, when in fact I was actually expressing interest in the Biocentrism thesis.
But as the recent posts show the critics of idealism will descend on you, as I realized at the time last spring.
Idealism as such isn’t the problem, rather the question arises as to how we could apply a vague term like ‘consciousness’ to holistic entities like the ‘universe’.
I had laid out a defense using a different approach based on the work of J. G. Bennett in The Dramatic Universe, where he bases his systematics, not on a duality of matter and consciousness, but on a triad of what he calls Being, Function, Will.
It is a very clever way to divide the pie and ends up making a distinction between things/stuff/entities that are material, are alive, are conscious. These are not the same thing, as with the last two predicates.
Schopenhauer produced the breakthrough here, for Bennett, with his understanding of will. But Bennett brings in the question of Being where it is absent in his idealism. Whatever.
The point is that with Bennett’s formulation (which claims to follow Indian Samkhya) all entities stand in relation to ‘being, function, will’, and their material, vital, and cosmic aspects are triadically variable. The degrees of the manifestation of the ‘wil’ allow us to pass seamlessly from the realm of ‘willing agent’ to ‘mechanical law’, with degrees of consciousness an aspect of being. Matter actually disappears (as a fundamental), and becomes a relationship of function, being and will, like everything else.
Will this really work? Hard to say, since it is quite a complex set of questions. But the simple antithesis of the material and the conscious can create problems of interpretation.
I think that the simplified version in Schopenhauer has great merit (if only because more comprehensible).
The point in any case is to see the descending transition from triads of the will to mechanical laws. Seeing the issue then in terms of will rather than consciousness can be helpful.
The point in general is that ‘consciousness’ and ‘matter’ don’t even enter as fundamental categories, but emerge from the triad of Being, Function, Will.
Bennett’s system is too complicated, I fear, and requires long study, but the gist is there in Schopenhauer, as you puzzle over his use of the term ‘will’.
Schopenhauer’s insight, out of the blue, offers a possible way to reconstruct Samkhya, as Bennett sensed, before he made a hash of the whole business, of this obscure Indian system, now apparently lost to all parties, Indian or not.
Armstrong’s ‘compassion’ theme has a suspicious resemblance to Schopenhauer’s theme here.
Armstrong magpies everything and turns it into a porridge.
Wikipedia on Schopenhauer
As much as I admire Schopenhauer I don’t automatically accept his critique of Kantian ethics.
Comment on Jollimore on Armstrong
James said,
December 5, 2009 at 3:22 pm · …or you could do something like Schopenhauer and come up with something that transcends both.
A good reminder, but I suffer from Armstrong venom which tends to make one forget the right approach for more verbiage.
Schopenhauer, as you suggest, ‘reconciles’ the ‘dialectic’ (But I doubt Schopenahuer would approve of that Hegelian notion, the ‘dialectic’) between theism and atheism.
Comment on Schopenhauer on death
mybrainisafleamarket said,
November 22, 2009 at 10:14 am ·
So…the movie ‘ends’ outside of the movie.
“The world as representation begins and ends with the consciousness of the individual representing subject. At the moment of death, all representation comes to an immediate abrupt end, after which there remains only thing-in-itself. An individual’s death is not something that occurs in or as any part of the world as representation. “
To be fair to Schopenhauer he never drew the conclusions from his own thinking that result in this kind of insight. But that in fact increases his credibility. He had no axe to grind, or any wish to resurrect religion, god, or spirituality, but created from Kantian/Platonic assumptions a perspective that is secular and yet resembles the Upanishadic view of things.
I think Schopenhauer can help us to see where scientism is going wrong, and how we can broaden our perspective with spiritual mythology.
It is important to consider Schopenhauer platonism carefull here, since the ‘movie outside the movie’ shows the treacherous thinking that arises from the consequences of transcendental idealism. The nature of existence outside of space and time must be taken in a very careful, almost experimental fashion.
Comment on Schopenhauer and death
reece sullivan said,
November 21, 2009 at 2:56 pm ·
I’ve had a strange relationship with William Blake in that he articulated a lot of things I’d already thought, only a couple hundred years earlier . . . and that we also have the same birthday, oddly, which will actually be a week from today: Nov 28th. At any rate, I found out that he said, as I’d said in different words before, that he’d already died and been “reborn” several times in his “life,” thus, we’re to take it that this might, on some level or the other, be applied to death, proper. Life is a series of deaths. I believe this is something one can see in Proust’s thoughts, too. What holds all these “separate” selves together so that we say they’re a person, ourselves? Proust’s main character was concerned that he would “die and be reborn” so that the (actual) death of his lover would become more and more removed . . . in such a way that he’d be a different person, essentially, only able to sympathize with his past self that lost his lover in the same way that one would sympathize with a stranger who lost his lover. In other words, whatever tragedies or joys we experience eventually become the tragedies or joys of another person: a past self that’s dead and that’s been replaced by a “reborn” self.Concerning “The World As Will & Idea” and consciousness:
When we think about science, for instance, trying to understand consciousness, we have to realize that the ultimate tool being used to understand and “explain” consciousness is, well, consciousness. The thing trying to understand and trying to explain is that thing we’re trying to understand and explain. We obviously have a hard time trying to categorize or even explain this phenomena itself: is it a “strange loop?” What is it that’s even going on here? Some say that the creative power of consciousness ends up creating a mirror effect, so that, on some level, we can always find something wherever we look that might, to degrees, seem to show us something. This could also parallel holographic explanations of the world. For this reason, I’ve thought for some time that if I could flush these thoughts out more and if I had the time and passion to do so, I’d write a book playing on Schopenhauer’s title named, “The World as Mirror and Idea.” Because it’s consciousness that’s looking, the world will seem to mirror whatever our consciousness is set on.