The question of a realist theory of language and all that this might imply may well be a decadent and nugatory pursuit. — Tom Storm

I'm willing to consider that me doing philosophy is like my cat grooming herself or sharpening her claws on this cardboard triangle we bought her.

In the finite amount of time and brief attention span of my life, I've never considered pursuing an intellectual or cultural project of consequence. — Tom Storm

Interesting to hear because it's been so different for me, though as I got older I realized it didn't really matter.

And I suspect that no matter how many years most of us are given to live, we are never going to be Beethoven or Kant. — Tom Storm

Very true. But when I was in a band we sometimes felt greatness in the moment, pouring out something from the center of us, whether or not it was relevant to others. Creative friendship is like a love affair.

Maybe being Peter the electrician, or Mary the accountant is a finer and more rewarding experience in the living of it (certainly compared to Beethoven). Even as a half-baked romantic, I think I would much prefer an 'enjoyable' life to an influential, or prodigious one. — Tom Storm

I hear you. Ties into the above for me. Relationships are central. Art can be a great part of that. At this point in history, given the surfeit of great stuff already out there, it's hard to want to play some belatedly recognized lonely genius or even some famous person too afflicted to enjoy the success.

For me, in the work I do (moderately reliable) intuition means being able to grasp almost immediately if someone has a hidden weapon on them or not and if they might be violent or not. Or if they are experiencing delusional thinking or psychoses. Or knowing if someone can do a very challenging job or not within seconds of meeting them in a job interview. I can generally tell when someone is suicidal whether they will act on it or not, based on intuition. I've gotten to the point when I meet a new worker I can often tell within a minute or two how long they will last in the field and what path brought them here - a relative, lived experience, etc. I think there are probably key indicators we can read but you need to be 'open' to them in some way and have relevant experience. — Tom Storm

Very cool to hear about this. This kind of knowledge seems to play a huge role in life and maybe doesn't get celebrated enough by bookish types. I'm guessing that driving is the average person's taste of a high stakes version of this.

Both of you describe reality as approximating the mathematical ideal.

Isn't it the other way around? Isn't the mathematics a simplification of reality? — Srap Tasmaner

I think the first captures an aspiration to (for instance) draw a perfect circle without a compass.
But I very much agree when it comes to fitting functions to data.

I've talked endlessly about this. Anaximander and his Apeiron. Peirce and his cosmic growth of reasonableness. The Big Bang as a symmetry-breaking of an "everythingness". — apokrisis

You definitely address the issue in general. But I have trouble (might be my problem) making sense of the subject or place of enunciation. Presumably we are stuck in/behind the human nervous, with human goals. Does that constrain your theory ? Can your theory serve the heat death directly (to put it playfully), or must it serve the replication of your genes ? Or ?

I swear I'm not trying to be difficult. I really want to clarify the issue.

In the very first sentence, you're wanting to objectify the observer, locate the observer in time and space. — Wayfarer

Well, yes, else observer metaphor is being stretched here into mystified meaninglessness. It sounds to me like Berkeley now, a theism merely asserted.

And there's a reason that the transcendental aesthetic is at the very start of the critique, because the remainder rests on it. If it is a 'clunker' then the whole project fails. — Wayfarer

Well of course his project fails if success is supposed to have been the achievement of a complete and perfect metaphysics. He said some wacky things. Doesn't mean he isn't great in the same way Schopenhauer is great --flawed but massively creative and insightful.

Every philosopher fails. But the pieces are picked up and a new arrangement is tried.

I'm not addressing you as an object, but as a subject like myself. — Wayfarer

The point is we are both encompassed in a world that exceeds each of us as individuals. Something can be the case even if you or I incorrectly claim otherwise. To deny this is to imply it. One need not talk of 'matter' or anything in particular to acknowledge the truth of a claim whose negation is an absurdity.
'There is no world' is a claim about the world.

Amen brother Flag! — wonderer1

Thanks ! I love preaching the word of Zod (who is great fun in Superman 2).

So do you want to be famous to history or a great dad? I would reply a good life is going to understand that these ought to be complementary goals, and that we should start by being satisfied by striking the right dynamical balance. — apokrisis

It's hard for me to believe in a free lunch. As Kojeve or someone noted, if we were immortal we could eventually get around to everything. But mortals are haunted by opportunity cost, to name just one ghost. Is it better to be Beethoven or Kant ? Who's to say with authority, having somehow been both ? And who's to say that what is 'said' in defense of Beethoven isn't the music itself ? Who's to say, with authority, that Kant told us more than Beethoven ? I live in concepts largely myself, but I can use concepts to contemplate the possible limits of their range and authority.

Kojeve's book on Hegel makes explicit this 'getting on' the escalator by assuming that a certain kind of conceptuality is the king's highway. Given that first step, the rest follows. But that first step is 'irrational.'

But that is how you could even construct a grounding sense of selfhood. — apokrisis

Well, yes. But there's a personality type that tries to ingest everything essential and worthwhile about all other types. Hegel is famously associated with the swelling blob that harmonizes errors (all other partial-finite personalities) into a grand and complete self-consciousness.

So we get a finite personality that wants to be its own other -- no longer finite. One's opponent always has about the same number of 'bits' of complexity, right ? Ye shall know them by their windmill / shadow / projection. To cast no shadow, to miss out on nothing essential. But we can discuss this attempt from the outside. Can the creeping fire of irony be put out ?

And why also frame this as what kind of historical individual would you like to be? Knowledge is collective. — apokrisis

I agree that knowledge is collective. An 'existentialist' tries to articulate the way the world exists through or for individual personalities who have to figure out their role, which includes deciding what knowledge 'really' is. This is just to tell the whole truth. [Kierkegaard raised similar issues about Hegel.]

The Conversation is adversarially cooperative.* I think we agree. What master does it sereve ? To what goal does it hasten ?

Answers to such questions are expressions of personality, adoptions of criteria, the getting on of escalators for a continuation (after the initial choice) that may be algorithmic. Beginnings are therefore mightiest.

Can one personality contain and reduce all the others ?

*Coherence norms individually may mirror the reality constraints on a tribe. A leader's incoherence leads to a nonadaptive cacophonous practice in an unforgiving world, so nature 'insists' on unified egos (on the memetic evolution of the universal adoption of identity as the norm of logical consistently and coherence in a being held responsible for explaining its actions). Brandom is great on this stuff.

Exactly. Except lossy is the feature and not the bug when progressing from analytical intelligence to synthetic wisdom. — apokrisis

:up:

I see this and completely agree, but what I'm getting at is instead the necessary tradeoff involved in having any finite personality. Lossy compression is one thing, but a lack of data is another. I can't explore every path and get all the 'data' in the first place. To be what I am is to also to not be what someone else is.

The living flesh is as primordial as language and world and tribe. — plaque flag

I take flesh in even a metaphysical sense. The body (of the one who sees and speaks, for that one ) is not just one object among others. It is the sun.

I think in relation to this synthetic structure, the biggest problem from your point of view isnt just Husserl’s treatment of the subject, but what he has in common with Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, and has led to the charge of linguistic idealism against post-structuralists leveled by the realist-materialist crowd. — Joshs

Now I'm surprised you would say so, because I'm basically coming from a Heideggarian place in my criticism of a Cartesian foundation. I love Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Had to buy a copy for the shelf. So I shouldn't be confused with someone trying to eliminate the 'subject.'

I'm trying to find a plausible 'big' story (grasp of how it all hangs together) that doesn't lapse into contradiction or absurdity or blind faith as so many such stories so easily do.

the dependence of world as well as subjectivity on a reciprocity that leaves no room for the coherence of any ‘material’ aspect of world independent of this reciprocal interaffecting. — Joshs

:up:

I'm 100% down with that (or can find one interpretation of it that I like). I call it Ye Olde Lifeworld. [It's just the world, but I'm trying to talk around certain biases.] The scientific image is just a piece of it, encompassed by and dependent upon it.

As I preach from the perch of my soap box, one cannot yank out either the subject or the object and still have the real thing. The true is the whole : promises, sassy looks, and earthquakes; checkmates, wankbanks, quarks, and continuous functions. 'No finite [disconnected, bounded] thing has genuine being.' Or (in a metaphysical-speculative fuck-practicality register) the ab-stract (the out-yanked) is ideal (a mere image, fantasy, fiction). [So the objects of that catalogue above and in general are interdependent for their meaningfulness --- have their being in relationship with one another. ]

In other word : holism.

In other words, there is no absolute time or space, existing independently of any observer - the observer furnishes the perspective which makes time a meaningful concept. — Wayfarer

But where and when is this observer ? Kant is justly famous, but this is one of his clunkers. It just doesn't make sense.

Au contraire, there’s a distinct kind of neuroscientific idealism visible in modern discourse. — Wayfarer

I've looked into Hoffman. He seems to make the classic sophomoric mistake of self-cancelling relativism. I've addressed specific claims of his in other threads on TPF. Note that I grant that what a person sees is function of both their individual nervous system and of the world. In short, we see the same world differently, from/through different nervous systems.

When you assert that ‘the brain is situated in time and space’, you’re tacitly assuming a viewpoint from outside your own perception of the world. — Wayfarer

No. I'm using ordinary language to state a truism. What has anyone ever known about brains apart from their 'involvement' in time and space ?

You’re speaking from the ‘God’s eye view’ which presumes that the world you perceive is real independently of your mind. — Wayfarer

But here you are talking to me, apparently assuming that I exist outside your mind, presumably informing me about our world, a world that transcends both of us --one that I'm somehow capable of being wrong about despite it being just my dream. It sure looks like a performative contradiction, another variety of self-cancelling subjectivism.

That is what Bryan Magee in his book on Schopenhauer describes as 'the assumptions of the inborn realism which arise from the original disposition of the intellect.' — Wayfarer

Sure, but you share that quote with me as if I'm a bumpkin who's never so much as heard of Descartes. I was myself much more of subjectivist philosophically until I came around to seeing the logical absurdities in the position.

It's not hard to find them.

Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts

Bingo. He's already talking about the world and other minds, informing us about that reality that only bumpkins are supposed to still believe in.

I like Magee, love his show, but he should have known better. It's almost like watching a series of mathematicians divide by 0 and not notice it.

I'd say forget sources and quotes for a moment and consider the logic. The flaw is right there.

The upshot, as far as I can tell, is that we are totally screwed. — BC

We do look pretty screwed. If you force me to play the optimist, a big breakthrough in fusion might help. If the price of energy was cut in half, what would that mean for us ?

Minimalism is growing in scope. It's generally secular and tends to eschew consumerism and owning lots of objects. I have been an informal and not very focused minimalist for many years. I am currently working to get rid of my car - I lived without heating and cooling for many years and own few appliances. — Tom Storm

Cool mention. I'm about as minimalist as my wife will let me be. The nice thing about pluralistic societies is that you can -- to some degree, this ain't Heaven yet -- opt out of a dominant lifestyle. I don't have to care about Taylor Swift or save up for a Lexus.

We keep cheating extinction just because we can, because unlike the other animals we can come up with strategies, plan ahead. — Janus

Right. And there's seemingly also a competition of cultures (memetic evolution.) Any tribe that isn't good at breeding and fighting loses resources that are good at such things. The winning tribe may be 'bad' by our standards (such as if Germany won WWII because they got the bomb first, as in Phillip K. Dick's alternate world.) (On that note, the idiotic antisemites ran off some of the talent that could have helped them win the war, suggesting an advantage of open, tolerant societies.)

There is also the fact that death, or rather dying, is associated with loss of faculties and capacities, pain and indignity, and loss of everything familiar, so maybe the fear is not entirely irrational. — Janus

If we filtered out all of that pain and humiliation, I'd wager that many would still feel from death. But yeah the association of death is aging and accidents and violence isn't the best marketing for it.

Oh, right, I have a couple of his books, which I've only dipped into. It was the "Nobby" which threw me — Janus

I just always thought it was a cool nickname. He liked to walk up mountains and talk philosophy with friends. I always thought that sounded like my kind of life. I'd call his stuff speculative psychoanalysis though t's all metaphors underneath categories like 'psychoanalysis' or 'theology' and so on. (I risk overstatement, but you know what I mean.)

I see it different in that my approach is that you can’t see the grand integrative sweep unless you make a matching effort to drill down into the concrete details. The process of inquiry is based on going to both these extremes. — apokrisis

I agree with you in the abstract, but in practice there is just too much detail for the finite individual to master. The world has too much richness, too much depth.

Even though I see a construction of a grand metaphysics as still possible and worthwhile, such a construction has to be a severe lossy compression of the world. It's not obvious whether it's better to be a Hegel, a Coltrane, a Chappelle, a Napoleon, or just a person who puts their parental role before all else, etc.

What I'm looking at is how the metaphysics might model its own creator and how it accounts for its own role. For instance, does the correct metaphysics accelerate the heat death ? I like to see how theories account for their own engendering.

The more I think about it, the weirder and less plausible it seems. Nevertheless, he offers enough to great fragments to deserve his status.

I like to use 'gnostic' as a metaphor for a person with a vision of the fundamental amorality of the world (as if the product of a clumsy or apathetic demiurge). The world is not run by the wisest and kindest, not administered by dutiful guardian angels. But there a rebel/underdog god or principle that one can fall back on. Muted post horn, countercultural esoteric spiritual comforts, etc. Schopenhauer seems to fit into this group. He does not preach world conquest. His 'escapism' (as an earnest communist might call it) is akin to that of certain stoics or skeptics who focus on their own private interpretation of the world and the training of their heart toward serene detachment.

I appreciate the detailed response about Husserl, but the larger issue is whether the intersubjective life world is an constitutive accomplishment of the solitary ego.

You and @Wayfarer both seem to want to emphasize the primacy of the subject and make the world as mere spectacle for or ex nihilo creation of some kind of constituting transcendental subject.

But serious objections to this claim are (it seems to me) simply ignored. For instance:

I need a nervous system to see a tree, but I also need eyes and a tree in an encompassing world. Or are we to claim that the eyes create themselves ?

But why the Forms and not just Will. Why the bifurcation of subject to object in the first place? Then it is just duality, not unity. — schopenhauer1

:up:

I think we know the real answer. Ordinary life gives us competing human beings, but one can learn to see through the 'illusion' of personality, which connects us to Hegel and Feuerbach and other thinkers of essential sociality of reason (there is no private language/logic, etc.)

Not to be contrary, but I think a more typical interpretation is like this:

Hence, the title of Schopenhauer’s major work, The World as Will and Representation, aptly summarizes his metaphysical system. The world is the world of representation, as a spatio-temporal universal of individuated objects, a world constituted by our own cognitive apparatus. At the same time, the inner being of this world, what is outside of our cognitive apparatus or what Kant calls the thing-in-itself, is the will; the original force manifested in every representation.

https://iep.utm.edu/schopenh/#SH2a

That gels with my memory of his bold claim to do what Kant said could not be done.

It's the direct realist idea that the brain is just a mirror "catching" reality (such as the objectivity of time and space) and reflecting it back. — schopenhauer1

I'd personally describe my preferred version of direct realism in terms of the grasp of a lifeworld that cannot be broken into subject and object except as a useful abstraction (fiction). Schopenhauer looks to me like an indirect realist who thinks the Will appears as everyday stuff through the lens of the nervous system. But our intuition and music lets us peak around the rest of our cognition at the essence of reality, blind striving.

Hegel, in one famous passage, defined idealism as holism. It's not that reality is a dream. The stuff that is ideal (mere fancy!) is all the machinery of the non-holistic metaphysicians who insist on denying the aspect of reality they don't like. No finite thing has genuine being. In other words, anything disconnected from everything else is at most a useful fiction, maybe just confusion and vanity.

For instance, the reductive consciousness-denying materialist wants to get rid of slimy embarrassing humanities stuff, and the life-is-my-dream crowd wants to get rid of the constraints of an encompassing world and the status of all that difficult math stuff. A one-sided personality tells a one-sided story of reality. [ I think we are all actually lopsided, all 'finite,' but I like the goal of 'infinity' and completeness.]

How can that be an error? — Wayfarer

The idea that the brain imposes the forms of time and space is absurd, for the brain is understood in terms of time and space from the beginning.

It does not make sense to say that the brain is its own product, as if it's the dream of itself.

Isn't it amply confirmed by neuro- and cognitive science? — Wayfarer

I'd wager that most scientists would reject the ideality of space and time (they idea that they aren't real but somehow products of a nervous system which is situated where after all ?)

On the other hand, who would deny that a living brain is necessary for an individual's experience of the world ?

all that is objective is already determined as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject through its forms of knowing, and presupposes them; and consequently it entirely disappears if we think the subject away.

I like to put this in terms of people trying to take the scientific image as somehow behind lifeworld in which it exists as a mere part. An electron only has meaning within an entire system of culture.

But we have shown that all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and ever active in time.

Here though Schopenhauer is guilty of an error in the opposite direction. He paradoxically makes the brain, a familiar object in the familiar space of the lifeworld, the cause of the presentation of space and time. This is a version of making the sense organs the product of the sense organs.

As I see it, both errors try to do justice to 'half' of the truth. The world exists for individual nervous systems which are embedded in that world. The world cannot be reduced to a 'dream' and the 'dream' cannot be reduced to some dead meaningless simple stuff.

Anyway, one of the ways in which we probably strongly agree is that it doesn't not make sense to claim that logical-semantic norms are somehow unreal, for those logical-semantic norms are necessary in the very making and support of such a claim.

One can, in my view, tell a story of emergence of spirit (a special kind of nature) from the rest of nature.

for it is not concerned with the inmost nature of the world, it cannot get beyond the idea; indeed, it really teaches nothing more than the relation of one idea to another.

Note how science is trapped 'outside' with mere relations of ideas, while intuition will have intimate access to the thing-in-itself, that ocean of Will.

I had to talk her into going, against my own wishes, because I didn't want to be the one to hold her back. I suffered immensely for a couple years, but I still would not do anything different if I had that time over again. — Janus

Ah that must have been tough. An act of love indeed.

I'm still with mine, though the first decade was one long Bukowski novel. We were too young really but glued together by an irrational passion. When I think of Schopenhauer, I think of the overpowering mating instinct 'forcing' most of us to make babies before we really know what life is. The 'old man' has been released from duty. The young have been 'programmed' not to take him seriously, and to worry only about their glamorous and fuckable peers. I'm sure I'm exaggerating, but the peer focus makes sense in the long term.

I am not familiar with Nobby Brown. — Janus

Also know as Norman O. Brown. One of those radical 60s thinkers. An almost mystical use of psychoanalysis by a humanities scholar.

Our own impermanence bothers us, but that seems to be an ego-driven concern. — Janus

To me it makes sense that we'd evolve an (irrational) fear of death. Schopenhauer filtered through Darwin is a strong dark brew. But I like it as a map for hacking the system (condoms are a great example of this, like steeling cheese from the trap.)

Many of the problems we face today seem to have come about on account of the predominating belief in human exceptionalism. — Janus

To me it's even to be expected. Darwin etc. We do of course have logical and sexual and property norms, but this is all to make human groups stronger. It's basically for us to crank out more copies of ourselves. The evolutionary algorithm could not see ahead to the exponential technological age, gave us no tools for controlling it. 'Only a god can save us' indeed, but I don't think any of them have the time just now.

Indeed and (this is only a minor point) I find it interesting how often pejorative language (like 'mechanistic') is employed to describe reason or science. — Tom Storm

I suspect it's because (for many) physics is still the prototype of the concept (in Lakoff's sense of something like a central semi-conscious association.) But biology for instance...

That is a big issue. But pragmatism gives its answer. If the problem is that your philosophy feels like it leads to passive representation, then that is a little Cartesian. It should lead to practical action. — apokrisis

Let me come at it another way. In our differentiated society, we expect people to develop in all sorts of ways. I'd say that our society is so complex that no single finite mind can hope to contain more than a tiny piece of the structure.

A certain kind of philosopher will aim at a view from the top of the mountain, integrating science into something more satisfyingly holistic and metaphysical (as I understand you to do.) But should Coltrane have spent his life on metaphysics ? Should Joyce have written a book more like Vico's than his own?

To me it's not obvious that the best view is the conceptual view from the mountain, which I say as someone attracted to some Shakespearean-existential version of that view.

Another approach: is it better to be Homer or Achilles ? Can one be sure without impossibly taking both paths ?

I guess I'm getting at the finitude of the individual.

Aren't metaphors and analogies about communicating structure of relations? — apokrisis

I think so. 'Analogy is the core of cognition.' If one thinks of poetry as a mere literary genre, then I probably agree with you. But if it's the basic metaphorical creativity of the mind, I think it is indeed core. (Of course core is a metaphor.)

But science has the claim of a method that transcends these games in the long run. — apokrisis

I lean toward agreement, but I consider that technology wins and is valued, as if scientific norms shine by reflected light. We'd worship clouds if that's what made it rain. (Which would be scientific, I guess.) Hypothesis non fingo. Will this bomb win the war ? I don't mean to come off as sentimental here either. Maybe I'm channelling Judge Holden from Blood Meridean or Herclitus, but it's as if war, father of all things, is the true Logic. This war-is-logic is like a demonic version of pragmatism. 'Shut up and exterminate.'

It's an attention economy out there. We have no choice but to dance to the beat if we want to be part of it. — apokrisis

Right. I mentioned the Moloch concept to you not long ago. Game theory looks to be at the heart of reality. Adapt or vanish. Hence the logic of war/competition. Cooperation is of course and advantage for the group of humans or group of organs. But there's always an outside, right ? Life 'is' exploitation. I say this amorally, trying to think that basic boundary.

Societies have political structures that are triadic once they become fully connected and self-stabilising – as in the particular case of British parliamentary democracy. You need the three elements of a state machinery (the mediating system of law), the transcendent ideal that symbolises the wholeness of the organism (the position given to a "divine" monarch as titular head of state), and the feedback from the ground floor in terms of a democratic say (the material degrees of freedom that are the mug public). — apokrisis

Excellent analysis, thanks!

Right, there is not one true image of philosophy. Personally, I favour the idea of it, not as a search for truth or correctness of locution, but as a generator of new concepts with which to look at things in more novel and creative ways, or alternatively, which may in some senses be the same thing, a philosophy as a set of ideas that fires the imagination in ways which could facilitate bringing about altered states of consciousness and personal transformation which enables living in better ways. — Janus

:up:

I relate to all of this. The metaphor is something like (creative) expansion, exploration, invention. It reminds me of Rorty, who'd call it philosophy's inheritance from the Romantics.

Personally I find myself fascinated by truth-telling inscription, but I know that this is just one possible path. I really don't know if other tempting paths are better or worse (or even that better/worse makes much sense here). My path is absorbing or rewarding or addictive or whateverish enough to keep me on it. I guess I'm even happy, despite/because my grim view of the world.

.

What is it to be the little worker working? — schopenhauer1

This is at the very center indeed, and it's strangely somewhat ineffable. Feeling is first but it slips through conceptual nets. So one doesn't judge life conceptually, it seems to me. Concepts play a role, but feeling is deeper in some sense. The world as will feeling and representation concepts.

I leave you with a ChatGPT poem of minutia: — schopenhauer1

Pretty funny stuff: a mixture of sense and nonsense, like a terminator trying to pass as a fellow nerd until its target arrives.

We are like burning bags of water that use bones like internal stilts to get around to plop more wood (food) on ourselves. We make new little bags of water because any particular bag of water starts leaking eventually.

Ignoring consciousness for a moment, what is life in energetic terms ?

A little replicating piece of crystalfire (controlled iterable burnstructure). A strange but ultimately futile climb away from the unstoppable heat death, its accidental servant. @apokrisis understands the details much much better than me, but I think I grasp the basic idea. Life can exploit (release) potential energy by using stored energy to pay the cost of activation, push the heavy boulder off the hill, install the waterwheel, build a fission plant over the course of many years at great expense. Can we measure the 'intensity' of life in these terms maybe ?

Well, I did start a thread called "Entropy and Enthalpy" and asked what the ethical implication is. — schopenhauer1

:up:

It is all in our heads which is somehow the Will presenting itself to itself via this weird dynamic of objectification conditioned by time, space, and causality. But WHERE is time, space, and causality coming from? — schopenhauer1

The it's all in our heads idea has always been doomed, it seems to me. It's with our nervous systems, yes, but these nervous systems are themselves encompassed the world they help us experience.

Even in Kant's own time he was taken out back for a spanking on this issue. (Beiser writes good stuff on this period in German philosophy. )

I don't pretend to know where it all comes from, and I don't think humans even can know, for one can always treat the explanation as itself needing explanation.

I think it's funny that the atomism of Western society only focuses on economic institutions. It creates its own self-contained nihilism. If we take anything like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs at all seriously, why wouldn't society be about properly slotting people's "needs" rather than market-driven transactionism? — schopenhauer1

FWIW, I agree that it's not rational or righteous. There's some brutal game theory involve, probably some thermodynamics. To oversimplify, whatever form of society can out reproduce and outfight other societies will end up with the land. Individualistic capitalism proved massively productive, even with all its corruption. It doesn't matter that it has no exit strategy and assumes endless growth. We ourselves 'irrationally' avoid death and pile up resources and make babies who'll do the same. Copies for the sake of copies, because bad replicators didn't last.

Nature is red in tooth in claw. I like Schopenhauer's grim honesty about the world. The Will is a 'demon.' The world is fundamentally irrational, a beautiful disgusting monster. Jung also talks about this in Answer to Job. If we want morality and decency, we won't get it from God. But we don't even want it (unambivalently) anyway. If we wanted a good world, it's odd to end up this way. It's as if this or that part of us complains always about an opposed part --and Schop wrote just this thought in one of his early journals -- anticipating Freud's metaphor of the psyche as a civil war.

'For God so loved the world' => 'Forgot so left the world'

Whence the Forms from Will? And "whence" is time, space, causality? WHAT is projecting this? Mind? Then where does that fit in with Will and Representation? — schopenhauer1

I think Schopenhauer is an unstable fusion. I never could take his metaphysics as a whole seriously. Also I'm refreshing my memory as I read, so I may get something very wrong.

But parts of his work have stuck me since I read the section dedicated to him in The Story of Philosophy decades ago.

Darwin and Dawkins 'naturalize' Schopenhauer. The 'Will' is an evolved set of 'irrational' motives and fears that serve the 'stupid' replication of genes. It's almost terrifyingly tautological, the theory of evolution.