I have a hard time making that work; how can you divorce will from intent?However, true enough, if I am making connections with Schop's Will, that has no hint of purposefulness, then using that word draws too much attention to the idea that there is an end goal to strive for. — schopenhauer1
Edit: Ah right, there it is, the balderdash about suffering. — StreetlightX
Thanks. I'm not too familiar with Schopenhauer, so tell me, do you understand him as having thought that Will did not require intent? — Banno
I have a hard time making that work; how can you divorce will from intent? — Banno
I gather this is a continuation of a discussion of which I have previously been unaware....? — Banno
According to him, the world is really will- a striving force that has no aim or purpose — schopenhauer1
Schopenhauer says that the more intense the willing, the more intense the suffering. So the problem is how to diminish the intensity of one's willing. The answer is actually a very simple one (though not, by any means, easy to accomplish): The answer is: practice denying the will what it wants. It's that simple. This practice is called asceticism (Greek = askesis) or self-denial and, according to Schopenhauer, is the one adequate solution to the central life problem.
The scholastic Latin term for this practice is "agere contra," to act against. It means the practice of deliberating acting against what the will wants. When the will wants something, you deny it what it wants. And, in addition, when the will fears or is repelled by something, you give it what it fears. Schopenhauer says
By the expression asceticism, which I have already used so often, I understand in the narrower sense this deliberate breaking of the will by refusing the agreeable and looking for the disagreeable, the voluntarily chosen way of life of penance and self-chastisement for the constant mortification of the will. (p 392) 1
A world without suffering, for example, would still have entropy. Humans would be doing what was an absence of their entire lives. They would always be this "work." Thinking about entropy this way leaves out our own lives and how they are distinct. We are more complex than being of a system that moves. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Granted, the way he conceptualised it, it wasn't a practical solution short of literally becoming a renunciate monastic or anchorite, but at least it was real. Nothing like that in the thermodynamically-driven processes of the physical universe. — Wayfarer
(It has also provided the basis for comparison between Schopenhauer and Buddhism and Vedanta, which is a fair comparison, albeit Schopenhauer didn't have any contact with actual exemplars of those traditions, even though he frequently wrote highly of them, and regarded himself as having a similar kind of philosophy.) — Wayfarer
Not sure what you mean though by at least it was real. — schopenhauer1
It is just a sort of disciplined practice, but I don't see it as a metaphysical escape hatch. — schopenhauer1
what counts to you as a "legitimate" (streetlightx approved) way to prove a value? — schopenhauer1
We are the universe's self-reflecting strivers. Pursuing due to the unrecognized underlying principle of entropy. We must work, work, work.. — schopenhauer1
I'm not sure what it means to 'prove a value'. This strikes me as bad grammar. — StreetlightX
You think axiology deals with proving values? — StreetlightX
The happy, contented and sufferless to move in their ways of living. Such a life would always be engaged in its maintenance, people doing whatever amounted to a life without burden
If this entropic movement does not fit with Schopenhauer's Will, so much worse for Schopenhauer. Entropy clearly doesn't reflect the Will on account of the latter being only a specific experimental results reaction. — TheWillowOfDarkness
All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering. Fulfillment brings this to an end; yet for one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied. Further, desiring lasts a long time, demands and requests go on to infinity, fulfillment is short and meted out sparingly. But even the final satisfaction itself is only apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one; the former is a known delusion, the latter a delusion not as yet known. No attained object of willing can give a satisfaction that lasts and no longer declines; but it is always like the alms thrown to a beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will [which is as long as we are will-filled living beings], so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace. Essentially, it is all the same whether we pursue or flee, fear harm or aspire to enjoyment; care for the constantly demanding will, no matter in what form, continually fills and moves consciousness; but without peace and calm, true well-being is absolutely impossible. (Die Welt, vol I, p 196)
And yet no mention... — StreetlightX
Well gee you could have just said that instead of asking how one might go about 'proving a value' as though that made any sense at all. — StreetlightX
We are bound by the conditions of our physical existence. — schopenhauer1
But this is simply an analytic statement - which is to say, a tautology: "bachelors are bound by the condition of being unmarried". Well no shit. But from this triviality you want to draw some kind of overwrought profundity by playing on the laden poetics of 'boundedness'. "Woe is the bachelor!". But this is wordplay, nothing more.
"We are conditioned by the conditions of our condition". Please. — StreetlightX
With Entropy and heat death, you have something akin to the will cancelling itself out globally, long-run, by amping up locally (negentropy). The self-defeat of the will, in the entropy/heat death model, is baked into the very existence of something like a will. Poetically: the will wills so that it may not longer will. The million masks of the one thing, are work the one thing does to stop being that that thing. — csalisbury
Whereas, with Schop (correct me if I'm wrong here, it's been a long time since I read WWR) but the will is kind of a constant ontological source, eternally self-renewing. It's only through the (non?)heroic attempts of individuals to snuff out the will that it can quiet itself.
If this is a fair characterization, I think these two ways-of-looking-at-things are deeply different. — csalisbury
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