Name: Schopenhauer as educator
ISBN: 9780895269508

What Hacker News says

trevelyanApr 2015

There are some interesting ideas buried in his writing (panopticon) but Foucault's ideas aren't consistent and it isn't even clear that he takes them seriously himself. Discipline & Punish is also pretty elevated nonsense.

The book makes sense as a history of penal reform, and Foucault is right to point out that changes often served to better punish prisoners rather than reform them as the rhetoric of the day demanded. But pointing out public hypocrisy is hardly a sophisticated observation for a historian to make. And it is a weak base from which to launch the sweeping attack Foucault attempts on the idea that morality matters, or to insist that man's "soul" is nothing more than his position in power networks or that "power" itself is "knowledge" (not vice versa).

In order to support these points, Foucault is dishonest on so many basic historical points that it calls the honesty of his actual historical research into question. I have a ton of underlined passages in my copy of D&P which I made with increasing frequency as his claims started to contradict each other. In the interest of just picking one, look at Foucault's insistence that democratization had absolutely nothing to do with efforts to remove the death penalty. Really? And Foucault "proves" his opinion not by citing a single document but rather by simply stating his opinion that "executions did not, in fact, frighten the people."

Well which is it? Are we truly to believe that the horrific demonstrations of torture which Foucault spends entire chapters chronicling (salaciously, like pornography) did not frighten anyone? Why if so does he describe them in such detailed fashion? And doesn't his own claim about the ineffectiveness of the punishment now contradict his earlier statements about the nature of knowledge, to say nothing of his earlier chapters which actually documented how people were, in practice, quite terrorized.

A lot of the dishonesty slides by in the sheer minutiae of death. And it all gives the impression that Foucault must be right, if only because he is able to a picture of humanity that would repulse most honest people and do so unflinchingly (the virtue of facing unpleasant truths!). But at a certain point, the discerning reader recognizes his sophistry for what it is and stops trying to make sense of it all. I'd encourage anyone on HN to go directly to Plato if they want real philosophy, or at least jump back to Nietzsche (Schopenhauer as Educator) if they want an entertaining and tongue-in-cheek iconoclast whose ideas merit real thought.

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yesenadamJun 2021

Welcome! Ok thanks, will check him out. Not really into dark though! <Checked him out> Arggh, yeah. He sounds miserable. Getting a headache reading that..well, it was 1933 I guess. Sounds a bit like Cioran, who I expected I might like but it's just continual depressed whining as if being smart means you must be miserable as hell, and pitying those whose don't share your misery. That doesn't sound smart. Mencken and Kierkegaard are about as far as I willingly go in that direction—not very far. But they're very funny and brilliant writers.

Well, one of Nietzsche's most amazing productions is one of his first, the short essay On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense (1873), somewhat in a similar vein to that Zapffe, but, uh, well, behold how it starts! :

In some remote corner of the universe that is poured out in countless flickering solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the most arrogant and the most untruthful moment in "world history" — yet indeed only a moment. After nature had taken a few breaths, the star froze over and the clever animals had to die.

Someone could invent such a fable and still not have illustrated adequately how pitiful, how shadowy and fleeting, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect appears within nature. There were eternities when it did not exist; and someday when it no longer is there, not much will have changed.

Further on, one of his most quoted passages:

What is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins. We still do not know where the desire for truth originates; for until now we have heard only of the obligation which society, in order to exist, imposes: to be truthful, i.e., to use the customary metaphors, or in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to an established convention, to lie collectively in a style that is mandatory for everyone.

Actually he had a lot to say about him—check out Schopenhauer as Educator, a long essay from Nietzsche's first (full-sized) book, Untimely Meditations aka Unfashionable Observations aka Thoughts Out Of Season—it's a very grateful tribute.

William James wrote so many great essays, and one of the most accessible, and touching, is On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings and its sequel What Makes A Life Significant. OACBIHB has a lot of great long quotes from various places, actually that reminds me, I think I rediscovered Stevenson's essays from a long quote in that, which is itself a huge debt. I'm into writers who faced life with joy and courage, and who love passing on that gift—Emerson, Stevenson, Chesterton etc.

Santayana - I never got anything from the systemy Life of Reason or Realms of Being, maybe I should try again one day. Soliloquies in England etc are short nontechnical essays on all subjects. My favourite books of his are the ones with long essays on particular philosophers or philosophical/cultural scenes, like Character and Opinion in the US. And the chapters on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Egotism in German Philosophy are among the best things written on those guys, as seems so often the case with Santayana. Cheers!

p.s. Come to think of it, this page on my website has links to a fair bit of James' stuff, and a few good quotes by and about him! http://www.adamponting.com/william-james/

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yesenadamNov 2019

I wouldn't say Nietzsche "embraced the nihilism". Embraced atheism, sure. Even The Anti-Christ I think says not a word against Jesus, who he seems to admire, but is aimed against the corruption of Jesus' teachings by priests and the Church. His teacher Schopenhauer–the first atheist modern western philosopher?–has much more of that nihilistic vibe - it would be better not to live, happiness is negative, lasting happiness impossible, the world is essentially annoying and horrible etc. Schopenhauer's also very Buddhisty–even had a bust of Buddha in his house–although I think arrived at his conclusions independently. Nietzsche at least tried to say Yes. Music was very important to both of them–S played flute, Nietzsche piano–and music was even more important in S's philosophy than Nietzsche's. Only through art, especially music, can we escape the miserable pressure of the Will, i.e. unconscious/life force/animal nature. Reading Schopenhauer's main book seems like Freud + Darwin. One of the essays in N's first book is the fascinating Schopenhauer as Educator. The chapters on S and N in Santayana's very readable and funny Egotism in German Philosophy are maybe the best, most insightful thing written about them.

I read a lot of Kierkegaard years ago - for a while he and Nietzsche were my two best friends! I avoided K's christian stuff - way too angsty for me, and over issues that mean nothing to me. (Well, I did have a religious phase where I could agree with him that christians are nowhere near christian enough!) But I love a lot of his other stuff. Maybe my favourite is Either/Or - some parts of it - the aphorisms, Crop Rotation etc. It's very funny stuff. He's either very compressed or extremely long-winded. And the endless whining about Regine gets very tedious..

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