Arquivo de philosophy | Page 105 of 116

The World as Will and Representation, by Schopenhauer

The World as Will and Representation… I think of this work always in dismay, because it violently attacked my already weak human dimension. The history is long… I remember that as soon as I started to study philosophy, the name Schopenhauer became recurrent. At first, I tried to study the history of philosophy, from a comprehensive perspective, to make it possible for me to structure a long-term study plan in order to initiate direct contact with the works. Whatever the source, there was the author directing bitter words to Schopenhauer, associating him with a radical pessimism, pointing the harmful bias of his work. Shortly thereafter, I read one or two books by Schopenhauer: I saw intelligence, but nothing so calamitous; I put it aside and carried on my studies. So I continued to listen to Schopenhauer, always Schopenhauer, and I remember reading an excellent essay by Thomas Mann, an author I hold in high esteem. Mann, in the essay, explores Schopenhauer’s influence on his own work, thanking for having read the philosopher early in his career. However, he classifies Schopenhauer’s work (whose heart is The World as Will and Representation) as a philosophy for “young people”, saying Schopenhauer then worked until the end of his days to justify, with “sinister fidelity”, a youthful philosophy. After that passage I completely lost interest in Schopenhauer, I ignored everything that Thomas Mann himself had said about the deep marks that Schopenhauer left on him for the rest of his life. I mean, I, in my early twenties, found myself immune to any kind of “philosophy for young people”, immune and disinterested. Then time ran. Further on, Nietzsche, who so often spelled the name of his illustrious countryman. Before Nietzsche, and even before studying philosophy, Machado de Assis, whose work held me and charmed me for years and years. When I study Machado de Assis by the critics, the scare: Schopenhauer’s notorious influence. Then I decide: I will read this The World as Will and Representation. Well… It is difficult to find words to describe this book and its reflections in my life. I recall Thomas Mann associating Schopenhauer with the search for death in life: perhaps it is a good definition for the work. What I can say is, for me, it was reading without return. There is evident wisdom in the book, which is but an extensive meditation. But this work, if read as one should read any work, with sincerity and giving credit to the author, is an authentic poison, and perhaps the most potent. There it is: I read The World as Will and Representation and I have esteem, admiration for Schopenhauer; but Schopenhauer, quite frankly, is no author to me, a born indifferent, incurable misanthrope, often accused of insensitive and with skepticism running through veins. Schopenhauer took care to atrophy my human dimension even more, exterminated my illusions, contaminated me forever. Nowadays it is fashionable to have “opinions”, “convictions”, read a book and say “I agree” or “I do not agree”. How easy it would be for my life if my mind were adept at such simplification… I would read The World as Will and Representation and say, with a finger up: I do not agree! After reading, however, I judged nothing had occurred. I continued my studies, I went ahead. I was immersed in some French authors. The months passed, and apparently, I felt immune to the philosophy exposed in the book. How naïve… It took me a year for me to notice echoing in my mind, every day, the words of this harmful book: “happiness is not to suffer”, “desire is an inexhaustible source of suffering”, “deny desire”, “deny life”… And I realized myself impregnated to the nail of indifference, oblivious to everything I once valued. I judged my acts and saw that there was nothing else that was dear to me as before, I became a tomb, distant from everyone, including the closest. I, who have never been a fan of myself, who have always judged myself harmful, pernicious, less human than the others; I, who have always been against my own instincts, having me in terrible esteem, measuring words all the time not to frustrate people, have seen the darkest and most unpleasant side of my personality strengthen and solidify in me, perhaps forever. All against my own will, imposed, driven by this damned The World as Will and Representation that, even if I try to deny, perhaps was the most impactful reading of my entire life.

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Luiz Felipe Pondé and the Genomic Problem

In the essay Da ciência e do medo, arranged in his Do pensamento no deserto, Luiz Felipe Pondé makes an interesting reflection about what we can call the “genomic problem”.

He says that once, “walking through the campus of one of the largest and richest universities in the so-called first world,” he talked about genomics and the risks of genetic engineering with a group of technicians in genetics and molecular biology. Here is what happened:

One of the techniques stated that she did not understand the paraphernalia that philosophy and ethics invented about science in general, more specifically criticizing the blah blah blah about the possible social developments of the concrete and daily activity of the genomic laboratory.

So Pondé proceeds in the essay as if he were responding to the esteemed proletarian of science, undermining all the impacts that a robust genomic industry would bring in ethical, social and moral terms. It is a scary scenario.

We are talking about genetic engineering, artificial insemination, gestation through artificial wombs, —who knows? — incubators and everything that cannot be imagined of the evolution of this gait applied on large-scale.

Pondé shows us how inevitable the process is and how it will attack the human being in its most intimate dimension, destroying inwardly important meaning-forming fulcrums, all driven by an unstoppable desire for emancipation. With morality buried by the gains of the technique, there will finally be the vacuum, exposed and inconsolable.

But what to do? How to avoid disaster? There is nothing to do. Science will serve as a support to the process, depending on its many wonders.

Here is how Pondé ingeniously presumes the advancement of the genomic industry:

The trend, as in the case of our genomic social agent, will be bureaucratic mediation operated by competent institutions. On the psychopragmatic and sociopragmatic level, what will be at stake is the continuity of the emancipatory process —and here we should take into account more seriously the advertising pragmatics: “Give your child the best of you!”, or “Are you not worrying about the future of your family?” “Social security is the keyword.” A tendency to social reorganization on a bionomic basis is irreversible. (…) A broad front of normalization will be put into practice: normalization of security insurance (inclusion of genomic goods in health insurance policies), legal normalization (definition of genomic rights), pedagogical normalization (definition of the pedagogical goal as the production of individuals horizontally psycho-bio-socio-happy), psychological normalization (definition of integrated personality as the right to guiltless biohappiness), social normalization (combating the privatization of genomic goods), political normalization (campaign against biofundamentalist prejudices — platonic root naturalistic dogmatism at the service of fear and guilt — and against genism, understood as discrimination based on the lower genomic capital of individuals excluded from preventive practice).

We are left, as always, with the resignation and the cynical smile to stamp on our faces…

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About the Pest

As usual, the contingency exposing the fragility of man, baring him completely. Its natural reflexes: fear and despair. So, nothing new: corpses have always scared. However, perhaps the new pest has exposed a fresh mass phenomenon: the dependence on work. I say this because I see those who, forcibly cloistered, scream when they see their lives emptied of meaning, i.e., if there is no work, what remains of man?

We talk here about a class that at least has some purpose in life… But here is what the pest illuminates, despite the obvious modern economic and social fragilities: the profession-oriented life involves an obvious risk, aggravated gradually by time, of converting into a fatal disease the emptiness of the hands that watch the work flow through their fingers.. Hands that, retired, can find on a rope their only relief.

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Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton

I feed my misanthropy of delicacies and she, in response, gets fat. Then I completed another year, smiling, and this time with a Chesterton volume in my hands.

Chesterton … If I had read him at twenty, I might have idolized him… But that is the way it is, and good thing it is! Behold, looking at the pages of Orthodoxy, I get irritated. Then, however, I exalt myself. And the summary of my judgment, after the calm of the reflections, is this: great reading! Because that is what great readings leave: strong impressions.

So we are going to dig into them, expose what stirred me up in this great work. Chesterton begins:

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums. (…) If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin: complete self-confidence is a weakness.

They sound like words taken from my thoughts. However, I make the note: how far is Chesterton from the Christians today! Modernity — Christians included — is contaminated to the nail of this stupid feeling called by Chesterton as self-confidence. When wisdom, whether like it or not, begins exactly in self-distrust.

There is a diffuse confidence today, both in man and in the future, which in Christians manifests itself through indiscriminate hope. The average Christian of our days does not hesitate, not for a single second, about what the future holds for him or about his own possibilities. What is no sign but of his absolute weakness…

Another virtuous passage:

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chessplayers do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.

What leads to insanity? The obsession with finding all the answers, in having absolute control over the environment. Therefore a mathematician, a scientist, often ends up unable to perceive his own insignificance, his own vulnerability, the limitation of his means of action and, considering himself capable of deciphering all the variables, goes mad, collapses, because the human possibilities are, at most, simply limited.

Chesterton continues, in a frank attack on modern positivism:

In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum.

I like this candor. Chesterton also points out, in his famous sentence: the problem in denial of God is what is put in its place. Fatally, believing in human possibilities is of peerless childishness.

Well. Behold, Chesterton begins to irritate me. I am already upset with half a word of demagogy, half a verb to encourage political action… And if I cultivate resignation and silence, then Chesterton suddenly paints me as the most despicable of beings.

And I see in Orthodoxy what, without a doubt, is the most detestable face of Christians: the Manichaeism. Just as it always hurts me to hear from someone why his idea is the most sensible in the universe, so I get bored with the arrogance of Chesterton’s words.

He starts by attacking the Stoics:

Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion.

If they are not like us, then how hateful they are! And Chesterton, guided by his own convictions, classifies as the most detestable those who refuse to act, to fight, to participate actively in society.

What Chesterton does, bluntly, is classify me as an intolerable person—just on my birthday, fellow?… — And I realize that our compatibility is impossible: Chesterton wants to convince me of his reason and impel me to action; I have no interest in convincing him of anything and just want a little peace, distance and silence.

I come to fantasize, for a moment, the following subtitle for the work: “Why me and everyone who is like me are the best human beings on the face of the earth and why everyone else who is not like me and does not think like me are intolerable and inferior”. And I hear the ironic and unbearable reply: “Exactly. Do you have a better way to defend your beliefs?“.

Chesterton continues:

On the other side our idealist pessimists were represented by the old remnant of the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius and his friends had really given up the idea of any god in the universe and looked only to the god within. They had no hope of any virtue in nature, and hardly any hope of any virtue in society. They had not enough interest in the outer world really to wreck or revolutionise it. They did not love the city enough to set fire to it. Thus the ancient world was exactly in our own desolate dilemma. The only people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up; and the virtuous people did not care enough about them to knock them down. In this dilemma (the same as ours) Christianity suddenly stepped in and offered a singular answer, which the world eventually accepted as THE answer. It was the answer then, and I think it is the answer now.

Let us ignore the just merit granted to the emergence of Christianity. From this point in the book, Chesterton begins to encourage action, even justifying Christian “violence”. And he does so by exalting the commoner, in an attitude that again draws a clear line between us. I simply cannot stand concerning someone who demands full agreement.

New stones were thrown at me:

By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference — Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation — Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.

Moral and political adventure, righteous indignation… How many corpses would be spared without such exaltations… But I do not go on: I refrain from convincing Chesterton. I feel absolutely unmotivated after seeing him trace the common people as the representation of prudence and wisdom.

To me, the slightest populism is already repugnant. To exalt popular virtue is to buy approval at the expense of independence. But I do not tax Chesterton as fake or cunning; it would be extremely unfair. However, at this point, I see more prudence in Zarathustra:

In the wilderness have ever dwelt the conscientious, the free spirits, as lords of the wilderness; but in the cities dwell the well-foddered, famous wise ones — the draught-beasts.
For, always, do they draw, as asses — the PEOPLE’S carts!

It is opportune to quote Nietzsche. Chesterton makes the following judgment of the poet:

Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being “higher”, do not know either.

My observation: Nietzsche knew exactly what kind of man he wanted to be produced; and this man is, in many ways, immensely superior to what would be the wise-man example for Chesterton. However, it is true, Nietzsche’s man will never be mass-produced, for this man is precisely the reverse of the flock’s man.

But no more objections and debate! This lines already require an endpoint. So let’s come up with the conclusions.

I am governed by a very simple principle every time I make a conscious judgment of value: I consider the value of something like the balance when its positive and negative faces are contrasted, exactly as in a balance. I try, whenever possible, to value the positive side, because the balance, even if it hangs on the unwanted side, usually offers me something that requires recognition.

So I do not hesitate about Chesterton: his excellent writing, his quality humor and his lucidity in the face of the great Christian issues do not allow me to judge him unjustly. I am talking about someone frank and giant.

Chesterton, however, finds me intolerable. But I am not like Chesterton: to him, I will keep honorable space among the authors of my predilection.

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