The Thinker Who Thinks For One Self: A Reflection on Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer caricatured by Wilhelm Busch

"...the greatest amount of erudition, if it has not been elaborated by one's own thought, is worth much less than a far smaller amount that has been well thought over.

...much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity, as a weight continually pressing upon it does a spring, and the most certain means of never having any original thoughts is to take a book in hand at once, at every spare moment. This practice is the reason why scholarship makes most men more unintelligent and stupid than they are by nature.

...he, that is, who thinks for himself, thinks of free will, thinks correctly he has the compass to find out the right way.

...the intellectual acquirement of the self-thinker is like a fine painting, which stands out life-like with accurate light and shade, well-balanced tone, and complete harmony of colour. The intellectual acquirement of the mere scholar, on the contrary, resembles a large palette full of bright colours, systematically arranged indeed, but without harmony, cohesion, and significance.

For the perpetual, the real, in its originality and power, is the natural object of the thinking mind, and is able most easily to move it deeply...In the realm of reality, however beautiful, happy, and cheerful it may happen to be, we move ourselves continuously under the influence of an oppression, which has ceaselessly to be overcome ; while in the realm of thought we are incorporeal spirits...

...how great and how near us is the problem of existence, of this ambiguous, tormented, fleeting, dream-like existence ; so great and so near, that as soon as one is aware of it, all other problems and purposes are overshadowed and hidden by it..." Schopenhauer, On Thinking For Oneself

During the course of writing this blog, from its inception, until tonight, I have been exploring a world of my own making. I have sacrificed a worldly career-seeking existence for a deep exploration into the development of self-motivation, self-learning of thinking for oneself. That being said, while I have risked the mental balance that all face when they dwell profoundly and thoroughly into themselves, I have begun to a feel a feeling of being in the presence of the trackless way, or "the pathless" as Jiddhu Krishnamurti said. To trust the language of dream is a daily struggle to remember the most obscure part of ourselves that the world tells us to deny, forget and leave far behind in the realm of sleep and fantasy. When dreaming begins to encroach on our reality, we become fearful, and as modern people, defensive. The breach of unreason is an affront to all we have been taught. It is the history of our own soul. When the words of great thinkers like Schopenhauer begin to make crucial sense and gain a new sense of pragmatism outside of the allures of becoming privy to an enigmatic philosophic tract, the inner world of one's own making begins with an awakening, illumined by the midnight sun.

See related post: Schopenhauer and the Unconscious Fate of Recurrent Thought

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Apocalypse! Apocalypse! We are at bay! The grocery stores are emptying, the streets are empty of cars and the sidewalks are full of an insane humanity. After days of hiding out, I finally emerge from my apartment, bewildered by the blaring sky. A man shouts prophecies from the nearby grocery store entranceway. A crowd of onlookers listen with eager intent. 

Frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi, southern transept, scene: Apocalypse, Detail by Cimabue

"Fuck you!" I scream at the man. At once, an elderly lady screams back at me, "Fuck you!". I stare at a blinding yellow ring on her finger, absolutely dumbstruck with comic bewilderment. I return to the street side under my apartment building. To sit with a homeless man on his bed of burning fabric. I stare out, deadened by the silence of a lifeless futility creeping into the human domain from the belligerent rage of Earth; her the final hour.

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To obviate from this bland mural,

Its strict pull underlies, as a lightning tremor

In the cooled dust collecting raw answers

From the autochthonous matrimony with foreign alliance,

Over the scarred mud-caked plains

Whose agricultural fertility gave way to chemical strife

In the selfish human pandemic,

Lining the hostess and her following with possibility

In the strong-voiced dirge calling back thousands’

Endless anonymity from the last day that rested with holy failure

...

Embracing the nervous mouth of the whole city in one dire expression

To last

excerpts from "Obviation from the BLAND"