Quick Coda on Schopenhauer

Not to be too literarily philosophical here, but I dropped some Schopenhauer twice in the last entry, so I thought I'd go ahead and recommend Essays and Aphorisms to others out there. Especially good coming from me; because, though our two dispositions are on opposite ends of the galaxy— my freewheeling optimism and his medicinally bitter pessimism— we still agree on one, giant, galactic issue: that Mankind, personally and collectively, cannot anchor his Ultimate Purpose in the nonhuman world around him. Mankind should shed any last vestiges or clinginess to the idea that Ultimate Human Purpose can ever have a foothold in, or smooth continuity with, a nonhuman reality. This is what makes Schopenhauer's bitterness medicinal: it disabuses you of this hope.

Where we part is in our attitude toward this little newsflash. Schopenhauer takes the bleak, Black Forest route through pessimism. I take it as emancipatory. If you think it through, any antecedent Human Purpose is really just equivalent to a mandate, an order. This is to say, if we found, discovered, or proved that a certain mode-of-living or certain noble end was our Human Purpose, this just means we humans have homework on earth. And even if you, like Schopenhauer and I, usually precede as though in a Godless universe, you are acting otherwise by asking for anything like an ultimate human purpose. Someone would have had to assign the homework. I feel relieved that I don't have any antecedent purposes to fulfill, or cosmic appointments to make... that we can make our own agenda.

I also add all desires and all purposes in with Ultimate Purpose, as being unconnected to any hard, metallic Reality or Fact. I think Schopehauer distinguishes them in a way; painting Ultimate Human Purpose as vain, but desires and other purposes being fundamentally Will, the very core of the world... I think we should even disabuse ourselves of a metaphysical conception of Will, and say that there is nothing to ultimately justify our desires beside pure fiat. We only need a good plan. For there is no greater desire than a Great Plan.

An added bonus is that Schopehauer is funny little curmudgeon and a darkly beautiful writer, even while slandering "the weak sex," unveiling the vanity of existence, or strongly recommending suicide. It's as though you're lonely, dying great uncle took up the vocabulary of German metaphysics and ran with it.