Plato's influence upon Schopenhauer's aesthetics: On the Idea and Nature

Aesthetics Today has a great post up engaging Plato's influence upon Schopenhauer's aesthetics, specifically the role Platonic Ideas play in alleviating suffering of the Will. He writes,

There is something other than what we normally think of as Platonic Ideas as play here. First, we have the notion of "sides of an Idea which rarely appear." Second, we value individualities expressing themselves and their peculiar characteristics, through an "unfolding." Since aesthetic perception of Ideas is perceptual it is a matter of seeing the inward significance...of individual things.

This points to how the Idea in Schopenhauer functions much like the Kantian Ideas, not necessarily as literal Platonic Forms in an ethereal other-world, but as fully natural, functional guides and lures to action. The author of the post remarks this functionality reminds him of Nietzsche (Nietzsche's pragmatic appropriation of the Idea-as-expression-of-Will) and how the expression of individuals proceeds along the lines "as-if" its metaphysical aesthetic were "true" or "real" as it would be in and of itself. In other words, it is not necessarily the "reality status" of the Ideas within the purpose of aesthetics which is important for the organism, but the function of the Ideas and what they enable the organism to achieve.

I recently picked up Vaihinger's The Philosophy of 'As If' with the above in mind. For awhile now I've been working through Kant's moral, social, and political philosophy sideline to a more general study of aesthetics (German romanticism and idealism) and naturalism. I've learned to distinguish between a kind of - what I call - "naturism" and the more typical philosophical naturalism, the former being metaphysically pragmatic and fulfilling a social-political community function that more or less elevates the category of "nature" to that of religion. Johann Gottfried Herder's Aesthetics is a representative of this as is, remarkably given his atheism, Schophenhauer. In the case of Schopenhauer it is the effort to temporarily alleviate the Will which paradoxically allows us to affirm what is immanent within a transcendental register. Taking the aesthetic to be of a transcendental register itself is a move made by all of Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer. Plato and Kant have much, much more in common I think than many suppose, but there are certainly engagements with the two in the thinking of the German romantics and idealists.

Link to the whole post can be found HERE.

Philosophies of art & beauty

This past semester's classes went exceptionally well. In particular I have to commend the students in my Philosophies of Art & Beauty class who did extremely well in handling what was for many of the students in that class their first philosophy class!  This was the second time I've taught the course while at Moravian and I stuck to the plan utilized so successfully the first time I taught it. In essence I basically followed the layout of the course that was taught to me when *I* was an undergraduate - topics, philosophers, textbook, and all.

Hofstadter and Kuhn's Philosophies of Art & Beauty knows of no comparison both in depth and breath if one is selecting a premier aesthetics text. While historically oriented it nevertheless provides students with clear fundamental concepts in a way that is also fresh and engaging with respect to young people and their views about art today.  I even decided to show the same rendition of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex that my professor showed to our class when I took the course and was so moved by it.



When teaching the course I begin with Plato on the good and the beautiful, discuss his theory of form, his theory of beauty found through the unity of variety, and his views on symmetry, order, harmony, measure, balance, and proportion. Next comes Aristotle on tragedy, techne' and technique in craft, the theory of form and matter with respect to creativity and the vision of the artist, and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Then was David Hume on taste and the role of the critic - asking whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder (a favorite question that students love to pose).  Then was Kant's four moments of the beautiful from The Critique of Judgment (by far the most important part of the course). We then read and discussed Schopenhauer on music, and ended with Nietzsche on tragedy, distinguishing Nietzsche's views from Aristotle's. What worked particularly well was using Nietzsche's The Dionysian Vision of the World in addition to The Birth of Tragedy, the former of which resonated with students in its clarity and audacity.

I have to say that along with courses like Continental Philosophy, Existential Philosophy, and Philosophy of Human Experience (Phenomenology) this course is certainly one of my favorites to teach because it provides more than ample opportunity for students to find a topic that genuinely interests them and they then pursue that topic working out how it is relevant in their lives.

This semester's class went really well and I am very proud of the students who worked so hard and learned so much.

Schopenhauer's Aesthetics (SEP entry)

Schopenahuer is a philosopher who, if you haven't looked at his work in awhile, certainly deserves to be dusted off and looked at . Sadly he is neglected in today's standard university survey courses when most definitely he shouldn't be. His relevance not only for aesthetics but for ethics, including animal ethics, is as strong as ever. I suspect that even in today's times he is overshadowed by Hegel. Try glancing at some Schopenhauer today if you can, or if in a rush perhaps the below, which has been updated. (Link is the title.)

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Schopenhauer's Aesthetics

 The focus of this entry is on Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory, which forms part of his organic philosophical system, but which can be appreciated and assessed to some extent on its own terms (for ways in which his aesthetic insights may be detached from his metaphysics see Shapshay, 2012b). The theory is found predominantly in Book 3 of the World as Will and Representation (WWR I) and in the elaboratory essays concerning Book 3 in the second volume...
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Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900 (NDPR Review)

More on Schopenhauer and pessimism in German philosophy.

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Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900
// Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews


Frederick C. Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900, Oxford University Press, 2016, 301 pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198768715.

Reviewed by Sandra Shapshay, Indiana University-Bloomington

It is well known that Schopenhauer's philosophy -- especially the pessimistic, resignationist strand thereof -- prompted Nietzsche to undertake a "justification" of life as an aesthetic phenomenon in the Birth of Tragedy, and an "affirmation" of life in many other works. It is not well known, however, especially in the Anglo-American philosophical world, that Schopenhauer's generally pessimistic take on the value of human existence sparked an entire controversy in Germany, the "Pessimism Controversy" in the second half of the 19^th century. Or I should say, it has not been well known until now . . . with the publication of Frederick Beiser's ground-breaking book.

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How Schopenhauer’s thought can illuminate a midlife crisis (Aeon)

The only thing missed is how, for Schopenhauer, art is itself an atelic activity and thus therapeutic. Schopenahuer's views about the function of art aren't mentioned at all in the article, which I found quite odd.

Still, a good article worth reading. Hopefully the book at least discusses Schopenhauer's theory that art is a anecdote to suffering and how art, in particular music, might lift one out of suffering.

Regarding "midlife," Schopenhauer's theory points to the fact that immersing oneself in the right music can experientially lift one's self up out of the regret of missed opportunities past or even the dread of uncertain future.

Link and article below.

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How Schopenhauer's thought can illuminate a midlife crisis
// Aeon

Despite reflecting on the good life for more than 2,500 years, philosophers have not had much to say about middle age. For me, approaching 40 was a time of stereotypical crisis. Having jumped the hurdles of the academic career track, I knew I was lucky to be a tenured professor of philosophy. Yet stepping back from the busyness of life, the rush of things to do, I found myself wondering, what now? I felt a sense of repetition and futility, of projects completed just to be replaced by more. I would finish this article, teach this class, and then I would do it all again. It was not that everything seemed worthless. Even at my lowest ebb, I didn’t feel there was no point in what I was doing. Yet somehow the succession of activities, each one rational in itself, fell short.

I am not alone. Perhaps you have felt, too, an emptiness in the pursuit of worthy goals. This is one form of midlife crisis, at once familiar and philosophically puzzling. The paradox is that success can seem like failure. Like any paradox, it calls for philosophical treatment. What is the emptiness of the midlife crisis if not the unqualified emptiness in which one sees no value in anything? What was wrong with my life?

In search of an answer, I turned to the 19th-century pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is notorious for preaching the futility of desire. That getting what you want could fail to make you happy would not have surprised him at all. On the other hand, not having it is just as bad. For Schopenhauer, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you get what you want, your pursuit is over. You are aimless, flooded with a ‘fearful emptiness and boredom’, as he put it in The World as Will and Representation (1818). Life needs direction: desires, projects, goals that are so far unachieved. And yet this, too, is fatal. Because wanting what you do not have is suffering. In staving off the void by finding things to do, you have condemned yourself to misery. Life ‘swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents’.

Schopenhauer’s picture of human life might seem unduly bleak. Often enough, midlife brings with it failure or success in cherished projects: you have the job you worked for many years to get, the partner you hoped to meet, the family you meant to start – or else you don’t. Either way, you look for new directions. But the answer to achieving your goals, or giving them up, feels obvious: you simply make new ones. Nor is the pursuit of what you want pure agony. Revamping your ambitions can be fun.

Still, I think there is something right in Schopenhauer’s dismal conception of our relationship with our ends, and that it can illuminate the darkness of midlife. Taking up new projects, after all, simply obscures the problem. When you aim at a future goal, satisfaction is deferred: success has yet to come. But the moment you succeed, your achievement is in the past. Meanwhile, your engagement with projects subverts itself. In pursuing a goal, you either fail or, in succeeding, end its power to guide your life. No doubt you can formulate other plans. The problem is not that you will run out of projects (the aimless state of Schopenhauer’s boredom), it’s that your way of engaging with the ones that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and thus expel them from your life. When you pursue a goal, you exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.

Hence one common figure of the midlife crisis: the striving high-achiever, obsessed with getting things done, who is haunted by the hollowness of everyday life. When you are obsessed with projects, ceaselessly replacing old with new, satisfaction is always in the future. Or the past. It is mortgaged, then archived, but never possessed. In pursuing goals, you aim at outcomes that preclude the possibility of that pursuit, extinguishing the sparks of meaning in your life.

The question is what to do about this. For Schopenhauer, there is no way out: what I am calling a midlife crisis is simply the human condition. But Schopenhauer was wrong. In order to see his mistake, we need to draw distinctions among the activities we value: between ones that aim at completion, and ones that don’t.

Adapting terminology from linguistics, we can say that ‘telic’ activities – from ‘telos’, the Greek work for purpose – are ones that aim at terminal states of completion and exhaustion. You teach a class, get married, start a family, earn a raise. Not all activities are like this, however. Others are ‘atelic’: there is no point of termination at which they aim, or final state in which they have been achieved and there is no more to do. Think of listening to music, parenting, or spending time with friends. They are things you can stop doing, but you cannot finish or complete them. Their temporality is not that of a project with an ultimate goal, but of a limitless process.

If the crisis diagnosed by Schopenhauer turns on excessive investment in projects, then the solution is to invest more fully in the process, giving meaning to your life through activities that have no terminal point: since they cannot be completed, your engagement with them is not exhaustive. It will not subvert itself. Nor does it invite the sense of frustration that Schopenhauer scorns in unsatisfied desire – the sense of being at a distance from one’s goal, so that fulfilment is always in the future or the past.

We should not give up on our worthwhile goals. Their achievement matters. But we should meditate, too, on the value of the process. It is no accident that the young and the old are generally more satisfied with life than those in middle age. Young adults have not embarked on life-defining projects; the aged have such accomplishments behind them. That makes it more natural for them to live in the present: to find value in atelic activities that are not exhausted by engagement or deferred to the future, but realised here and now. It is hard to resist the tyranny of projects in midlife, to find a balance between the telic and atelic. But if we hope to overcome the midlife crisis, to escape the gloom of emptiness and self-defeat, that is what we have to do.

Kieran Setiya

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
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The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer's Pessimism (NDPR Review)

Dennis Vanden Auweele, The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer's Pessimism, Routledge, 2017, 242pp., $149.95 (hbk), ISBN 9781138744271.

Reviewed by Robert Wicks, The University of Auckland

The title of Dennis Vanden Auweele's book raises one's curiosity. As it tells us that Schopenhauer's pessimism has a Kantian foundation, it intimates that Kant's philosophy itself contains a pessimistic strand. This is unexpected, since pessimism does not appear to be a particularly Kantian quality. Kant's moral theory upholds the belief in individual freedom, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God who serves to coordinate happiness with virtue in an ideal end-state. The book reminds us, though, that a pessimistic aspect of Kant resides in a position he maintained in the later part of his career -- one reminiscent of the Christian doctrine of original sin -- that rooted in the human being...

Read more HERE.

Louis C.K., Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on How to Suffer and Be Happy

Partially Examined Life considers why happiness so often presents itself as a problem. HERE.

On a related note, my First Year Writing Seminar, a first year writing seminar developed for first semester college freshmen, is going wonderfully. What a great, great bunch of kids this year. All doing the readings, all have plenty to say, all intelligent and polite. Wow. Blown away by this bunch. The seminar is called "What is the Good Life?"  Basically faculty pick whatever topic they'd like to teach and then follow the basic outlines of a writing course with that content serving as the main center of reading and discussion. We are using Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Epicurus' The Art of Happiness, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

Great class, fun to teach.

topic for University of Bonn 7th International Summer School in German Philosophy

News from the annual summer school in German philosophy...title, dates, abstract, and link below:

"Freedom and Free Will in Classical German Philosophy“
July 10-21st, 2017
University of Bonn

The 7th International Summer School in German Philosophy will trace the central debates concerning the concepts of free will and political freedom in the Post-Kantian tradition. This course will attempt to provide a fairly comprehensive critical overview of the theories of political freedom and free will that were so central to Classical German Philosophy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will begin by looking at the ideas of political freedom and free will as they developed among the ancient Greeks, in early Christianity and in Luther’s hugely influential essay The Freedom of a Christian (which influenced among others Kant, Schelling and Hegel). We will then move ahead to consider a family of compatibilist theories of free will that were developed around the middle of the eighteenth century (Hume, Wolff, and the early Kant). We will then briefly consider Kant’s liberal political philosophy and especially the unusual synthesis of incompatibilism and compatibilism that he developed in the Critical period (the Third Antinomy and the Second Critique). 

From there, we will move to the Post-Kantian constellation and focus on selected texts by Schopenhauer, Schelling and Hegel. Arguably, the Post-Kantian philosophers confront Kant on metaphysical grounds in that they believe that Kant’s metaphysics of nature gives rise to a placement issue, as it is hard to see how human freedom could fit into a causally closed world-order of the type envisaged by Kant. Hegel, however, revises the Kantian framework in a radical way by attempting in effect to replace a metaphysical conception of free will with his conception of socio-political freedom as laid out in his Phenomenology of Spirit and his mature Philosophy of Right. 

Our last focus will be Hegel, who can be seen as developing a distinctive multi-level theory of several different sorts of freedom, including free will, socio-political freedom, and what one might call metaphysical freedom. Finally, we shall consider Nietzsche’s views on free will, which are striking for their tendency to call both the idea of the will and the idea of its freedom radically into question. 

The first week of this course will be run by Prof. Dr. Michael Forster, the second by Prof. Dr. Markus Gabriel. As always, we will invite a series of high-profile keynote speakers.

Link to website HERE. (Including contact, directions how to apply, etc.)

Beauty (SEP entry update)

Crispin Sartwell updates the entry. I used the entry just this past week for the Philosophies of Art & Beauty course I am currently teaching. It's really quite helpful for the students it seems.

See here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/

my latest book now available

I am proud to say that my most recent co-edited book, A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism, is finally published! The book is the result of two and a half years of hard work, but I think the end product was well worth it. Anyone who is interested in a good introduction to the philosophy of Robert S. Corrington - his "ecstatic naturalism" - should pick up this book. The amazon link is HERE. Act quickly as apparently they are already selling out on amazon for a reduced price.

If you are curious about how ecstatic naturalism fits into today's metaphysics of the 21st-century, specifically as an American complement to Continental philosophy, I have posted the first page of our introduction in addition to the table of contents.  Along with Robert Brandom, Nicholas Rescher, and William Desmond, Corrington certainly has a new outlook to bring to the table within Euro-American philosophy (those philosophies that synthesize the Continental and American traditions).

"Crash and Burn: Debating Accelerationism" (Alex Galloway and Ben Noys interview at 3:AM Magazine)

Link HERE.  I think what's interesting, for me at least, is how at one point in the interview it is suggested that there is a sort of "Existentialist Revival" going on.  But unlike classical existentialism the subject is either annihilated, or it is "evacuated" into an undetermined space of the future.

I think the "evacuation" of the subject puts it best, in the sense that with the always ongoing annihilation of the present out-moded subject a new form of subject is continually being re-created on a basis or "ground" of freedom which is the very possibility of the future.  In this it seems the classical existentialists were right.

The existential moment in Accelerationism seems to be that an existential self, a self-creating "self," is only a self in its light of its continual and future self re-creations.  This is a process of creativity that creates at perpetual telescoping speed until a base line of flight (infinite speed) is achieved.  Here the immanent presence of self-hood and the ground of freedom and creativity upon which self-hood is based would become an indistinguishable one.  At that point time would ultimately be transcended.  So this process accelerates in creativity and intelligence faster and faster, moving and being driven by a form of tension found in a vital negativity that continually uses its own out-moding (or continual "crashing and burning," continual self-revision) to leap over itself again and again in acts of self-recreation until a point of absolute singularity is achieved.

Also, in the interview there is plenty of discussion about the role of the negative - or what in the past I have referred to as "vital negativity."  Here it seems that not only Hegel and Nietzsche are lurking in the background -  Nietzsche for his, what he called "active" nihilism, endorsed over what he called "passive" nihilism - but also Schopenhauer, whose name is brought up with mention of Land, Thacker, and Brassier.

This interview has prompted me to glance at again Schelling in the context of his "proto-existentialism."  What is the role of freedom and vital negativity in Schelling's proto-existentialist work?  How does that sense of freedom relate to the sort of freedom, futurity, and vital negativity that classical existentialists endorse in their discussions of the self and its creative act of determining a future self.  What about Sartre or Jaspers, for example?  Would Schopenhauer here too have a form of proto-existentialism?  And finally, in what sense might "will," or in terms of contemporary metaphysics - agency - come to play in this?

Could we update classical existentialism in this current "revival" and call it agentialism?  

Varieties of Panpsychism?

Jon Cogburn has a post up discussing panpsychism, HERE.  He makes an interesting distinction between forms of agency-based versus intellectual or concept-based panpsychisms advocated by Schopenhauer and Hegel.

He then proceeds to mention where Bergson, Whitehead, or Deleuze may fit into one of his three articlations mentioned in the post (physical Cartesian panpsychism; agential or "will" panpsychism; or a panpyschism of mind understood as concept-formation).  He also mentions Schelling too, placing him in the agential/will category, which makes sense to me.

Peter Gratton on the pain of rocks

In a recent post, Peter Gratton had THIS to say:

The stuff on new materialism–I noted this at several times during the conference–has run its course. Liz Grosz talked about the pain of rocks, Barad discussed the unconscious of protons…we have moved to the stage where there’s no method for the use of these terms, except anthropomorphism. I almost want to analyze why certain figures (and there were many at the conference) want to arrive at the conclusion that rocks have a world, etc....[T]here’s this stuff about the pain of rocks and it having a “pure auto-affection”–it’s a conclusion that seems wanted at this moment. I’ll have to think this more through, but count meas incredibly dubious: it doesn’t multiply the differences in the world but in fact says to the world, you’re great, you’re like us. Martin Hägglund, who also gave a great talk, and I chatted about this quite a bit. (In any case, there’s an easy way out of not doing anthropomorphism, at least one from the tradition that inspires new materialists: just go Spinoza and say there are many more attributes to the modes than simply mind and body. And thus a rock’s self-relation may be many things that we cannot gather given our own attributes.)

This is perplexing.  I don't think that it is anthropomorphic to speculatively explore non-human consciousness supposing that non-human worlds of experience overlap or may be like our experience in some respects, as much as they may be unlike our experience in other respects.

In the tradition of Jakob von Uexkull or even to some degree William James and Alfred North Whitehead, it isn't about multiplying different world pictures nor even rendering them common to ours, even though the diversity of world pictures has its place.  I think it is about speculatively and phenomenologically allowing non-human worlds to exhibitively self-display their experiential features where these features are attended to for what they are.    Ordinal phenomenology is one method, speculative naturalism another; there is also semiotic phenomenology or more broadly bio and ecosemiotics.  For several years now I've commented on how it isn't anthropocentric/anthropormorphic at all to find that pain, for example, is part of a constituting domain which is extra-human (or non-human).  It's one thing to read a human face across nature by imposing human emotive qualities upon other things within the world, but another to realize the broader intensive aesthetic character of the natural world of which human beings are but a small part.  Equally alien (distinct with our own modes of perception, as are all organisms) we are nevertheless deeply natural - deeply "part" of nature.  

I realize the trend is to de-humanize nature as much as possible, but really, human beings are part and parcel of nature, and so we can expect that what we experience is continuous from the outside in rather than assuming it is always the case we project our experience (onto others) from the inside out.  This is what Gratton seems to miss. 

Even removing human beings from nature and stating, "Ok, the experience of others may not be like our subjective experience" doesn't mean that others aren't capable of experiencing emotion, pain, etc. etc.  The fact is, it isn't our experience to begin with.  If human beings didn't exist, elephants would still grieve the loss of a matriarch, dolphins would still express joy, crabs would still feel pain, and so on.  Further still, all things - taking a panexperiential viewpoint - would struggle to persist and would undergo self-relations.  We don't need to appeal to analogies involving human-centered experience to make that case.  No one is saying the world is like us.  I (for one) am simply saying that we are part of the world, naturally, like everything else.  If that is true then there is continuity as much as there is difference.  Neither is absolute in reality although it is possible to take either epistemologically true and absolute.

Schopenhauer stated that empathy, given the reality of suffering. could be a basis for ethics; and no one wants to suffer afterall, Yet it seems that the conclusion ontologically precedes what things are.  Which is to say, yes, all things do suffer in their basic and most essential persistence, ontologically. The ethical judgment regarding that ontological fact is a "second," as Peirce would say.  Not a "first."

For those interested I discuss some of this in my forthcoming Animal Experience: Consciousness and Emotions in the Natural World (Open Humanities Press Living Books About Life series) and did speak to some similar issues in my most recent radio interview with the Philosopher's Zone on ABC National Radio in Australia.  Regarding pain and panentheism (which involves a modal and multinaturalist or theistic naturalist account of pain and God; or how pain and intensive aesthetic quality transcends human beings and is not constructed by them), see my "Speculative Naturalism: A Bleak Theology in Light of the Tragic" (forthcoming through the Journal of Nature, Culture, and Religion this summer).

Universe Crueler, More Uncaring Place Than Previously Thought (cosmic pessimism)

This parody reminds me of a more serious thought I had some time back, HERE.

Otherwise, in the words of Schopenhauer, "Contempt is not incompatible with indulgent and kindly treatment."  From Studies in Pessimism (Link HERE.)

the ruthlessness of metaphysics: thoughts on (dark) vitalism

Philosophies of "life," "vitality," "creation," "experience," and so forth have been a frequented topic of discussion lately, largely in the context of critique (and I am generally in agreement with these critiques, drawing from Corrington's brand of naturalism which refuses to "sugar coat" creative activity as some form of power conducive to strictly human interests or which is somehow solely life-affirming rather than fitting into a more capacious and indifferent metaphysical perspective).  This is not to say, however, that philosophers such as Whitehead, Deleuze, or Bergson (and their respective emphases upon creativity) are unimportant.  We just should be wary of ascribing a specifically positive moral component to grounds and powers, creative activity, negation, and so forth. 

Partially responsible for these "vitalist" concepts reappearing - in addition to the fact that they are hallmarks of life-affirming immanentisms with corresponding "flat ontologies" - has been Latour's use of the concept of "creation" in his Gifford Lectures.  As well, creation and creativity are central themes in process philosophy, notably in Whitehead, but also others, where contemporary "vital materialists" or "neo-vitalists" have been making use of these themes.

In the same camp of "neo-vitalism" however is a line of thinking opposed to vibrancy (or positive creative addition) where emphasis is placed instead upon negation and death drive, or what I have titled "the vital negative."  Some lines of thought in this camp even bleed over into the philosophy of "accelerationism" and its themes involving death drive and the all out abnegation of life, an ethos of nihilism, and a hyper-Nietzscheanism.



The point of this post is to nod in a direction of productive tension that has been lurking underneath all of these philosophies all along.  It is no secret that Robert S. Corrington's "ecstatic naturalism" supplements most "sugar coated" forms of naturalism (essentially the history of American naturalism).  In a similar manner, Ben Woodard's "dark vitalism" may be a good substitute for weaker forms of vitalism where life has ceased to be a problematic.  Corrington and Woodard both offer an account of nature that reveals indifferent grounds and powers.

I would like to state that a tempered balance ought to be struck between the practice of metaphysics understood as cold indifference and clear eye to the world, to the "horror of life" as it is in its full gory details and metaphysics understood as warm embrace of positive genesis, where there is some outright moral component in that whatever is added to the universe is intrinsically good (and therefore the "horror" is only a problem if one understands it phenomenologically and ethically).  I would actually make a distinction between positive value and moral goodness, between negative value or negation and darkness as a concept of horror.

As I see it, this is not to say that the genesis of intensities, making for aesthetic contrasts of value, is not the expression of value itself.  This is also not to say that the world is inherently "meaningful" (as opposed to saying that the world possesses a power to transmit information, a natural semiotic, where "meaning" means transmitting information).  As Peirce said, ethics follows from aesthetics.  The aesthetic is of no specific moral value.  That comes later.

On the other hand, this is also not to say that we ought to "dance in decay" - that we ought to celebrate dark features of life in the sense that because the horrible is opposed to "warm forces of life" we may as well call ourselves "nihilists" and rally behind claims which state that an intrinsic lack of human centered meaning is good.  (Enlightened perhaps, but not "good.")  This is just as anthropomorphically deluded as it is to embrace "creation" as an in and of itself morally positive activity.

Detachment and precision, universal abstraction, the cold practice of metaphysics, reflects a nature that is largely indifferent.  There is no capital 'N' "Nature" whose intentions are malignant or benign.

A cold, bleak, indiscriminatory metaphysics, a "ruthless metaphysics," is one that abstracts the general features of the world, speculating into territory which may exhibit no care for the human, for the living.  The fact that we may feel special that we are receiving the honor of getting wiped out - whether humans or the universe we live in - isn't actually so special given the fact that this is a world where value understood ethically, morally, is "after the fact." The objective intensity of the world is not without value in itself. Specific "moral value" is a matter of human feeling toward that intensity as a second order effect.

Simondon's "transindividual" and a nonreductive relationalism

This is on my reading list for some research that I am doing on the metaphysics of individuation, but in the meantime "The Genesis of the Individual" and "On the Mode of the Existence of Technical Objects" will suffice.

Also linking Shaviro's recent post on this book, to come back to later.

darklife: negation, nothingness, and the will-to-life in Schopenhauer

Continuing on with the theme of Schopenhauer for today, I never realized that Schopenhauer was so adored by dark vitalists, transcendental nihilists, etc. etc.

Schopenhauer makes a fine alternative if one doesn't find Bergson's vitalism to taste. The question boils down to whether there is a role for "negativity" in Bergson (perhaps even as an attitude, pessimism) or whether positive creative-addition debars that automatically.

Can there ever be real loss in a universe which preserves all in the objective immortality of the past?  This Bergsonian/Whiteheadian view of a cumulative durational succession would be contrasted with Schopenhauer's belief that, "Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value."

"Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer," by Eugene Thacker, Parrhesia 12 (2011):  12-27. 

what I'm reading

To the end of completing a new article that I've been sketching in rough outline, I've been reading two philosophers again and again: Plato and Bergson.  To this perhaps unlikely combination I would add another strange bedfellow: Arthur Schopenhauer.

I've just finished up a large chunk of research concerning the implicit normative nature of the dynamic-sensible conditions which are responsible for animating "affective" judgments - especially the sort of judgments involved within the domain of ethics.  My goal is to articulate how those judgments relate to ethical (and perhaps even political) Ideas - a physics of the Idea within the domain of ethical theory, really. 

To my mind, Plato and Bergson are a much, much better combination than, say, Aristotle and Leibniz or Lucretius and Spinoza if one is looking to explore the metaphysical foundations of ethics and affectivity, as those combinations (necessarily, it appears) seem to lead one to either a vast competitive powers pluralism or a reactionary ethical materialism of self-serving "dog eat dog" monads.  (N.B.  I must say, however, that Hartshorne's ethical treatment of Leibnizian monads in Whiteheadian vein - that is, as societies of occasions guided by a dominant monarchical monad, is something that I look favorably upon due to my metaphysical commitment to panpsychism and panentheism.  For more information on that see the section "Social Process," HERE.)   

Still, in my research I seemed to be missing one piece of the puzzle that Bergson was pointing to when it comes to discerning the objective "sources" for morality - sources that cannot be reduced to or found within centers of specifically human consciousness.  Enter one Arthur Schopenhauer. 

I first must say that Schopenhauer made his way into my purview most recently when I was writing about Deleuze and aesthetics (the article that I just published for AJTP).  We also read plenty of Schopenhauer this semester as part of a reading group that we just finished up, "Philosophers of the Unconscious: Schelling and Schopenhauer."  And Schopenhauer's aesthetics is just something that I am generally interested in.  So perhaps it was just a matter of time before I turned my attention to his ethics.

I'll leave this endorsement open for the reader: go read Schopenhauer's book on ethics, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics.  The point is that even though Schopenhauer would seem to endorse a competitive powers ontology where an infinite number of centers of willing strive to live at the expense of other living things, that is hardly the case.  Rather, Schopenhauer explains how, given such a competition, acts of compassion are possible.  Enter a theory of affectivity, in addition an ethical-aesthetic theory conducive to the sort of ethics of openness and compassion purported by Henri Bergson. 

To boot, Schopenhauer's ethics of affectivity knits well with animal ethics; that is, of explaining how genuine acts of compassion are possible among all living beings, not just the human, and so we are urged toward an openness of affectivity and relation "beyond" the human, to human and nonhuman alike.

"Transcendence" thus first means: crossing that limit which encloses the human being.

the dark side

As I lay awake unable to sleep, in order to grow more tired I do something that I know that I am not supposed to do: go to the computer ... (this and television are stimulants, they are the last things that one should toy with for sleep).

So, quickly: the reason that I am sleepless is due to pain.  With all due discretion I'll forgo details, but those close to me know about my health issues and can tell you that I am no stranger to pain.  Reflecting on some of my posts below that celebrate the ecological ethic of life and relation, growth, and empathy with other beings' perspectives, it is times like these that I am starkly reminded of "the dark side": we should acknowledge, too, the extinction of perspectives, of pain and death.  See for example my post on Schopenhauer, another one of my favorite philosophers.

Robert S. Corrington, creator of the school known as ecstatic naturalism, states that we should be careful not to "sugarcoat" nature - that is we should not over-emphasize a strictly comfy place in the cosmos for the human.  It just takes one jolt, an experience (Dewey and his naive optimism) to quickly remind you that we are all finite, we die, and its all part of the process (thus one other way to establish ontological parity - that in the sense that our singular existences can be extinguished at any moment, contingently - death is a reality equally shared).

Perhaps this adds even more value to what we may want to cherish.  Pain and suffering are alive and well, and they, too, serve as methods of contrast in the aesthetic experience of value.  

Hopefully I'll be able to get some sleep.

The Body of Sublime Knowledge: The Aesthetic Phenomenology of Arthur Schopenhauer

Luchte, James. "The Body of Sublime Knowledge: The Aesthetic Phenomenology of Arthur Schopenhauer" Heythrop Journal, Volume 50, Number 2 (Spring, 2009): 228-42.  Link to the article on the author's webpage.