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

__________

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.

__________

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"  

Spiritual Murder of the Mythopoetic Role

Fuxi and Nuwa by Anonymous

"Mythopoeisis is the act of shaping a myth into a new form, of making it anew; now I believe each of us does this poetic act daily, only we are not conscious of it, but myths, if alive, are always being renegotiated; we cosign them once more each day we wake up and go about our lives; but the action is unconscious. Poetry makes these processes conscious."

"...the individual psyche cannot, much as often it would like to, to be separated from the collective. Understanding the archetypal nature of our waking life and of our dream life would go a long way to revealing this truth."

- Dennis P. Slattery, from an Interview with Archetype in Action

________

“I have never traveled through West Africa! I have only seen East Africa.” I shout to the unconcerned on a bus through mud flats on the outskirts of town in Ghana. “It’s more industrialized here.” Suburban homes, colorful and well-roofed lie interspersed atop the unstable ground. Nothing grows here.

The plains shake off their sanded winds out onto a horizon as flat and majestic as any under a dim gorge of sky above. We approach an underprivileged village. The beams of their homes show with skeletal fright, a ghost of a shelter buries the inhabitants under a schema of incongruous monetary divisiveness. I am let out here with a group of excitable travelers. After a few bitter hours gazing into the masked poverty, the rest saunter off, straight into the shale-thin horizon, across the plain desert, leaving me behind to my shameful enjoyment.

The first unusual occurrence I notice is an old man, an elder, conducting witchcraft rites from a burlap, animal hid covered hut, half-emerging from a height of wires in the modern town center. He presses his hand up against a carved, convex piece of bone and wood overhead, pressed into the ceiling of his dusty keep. With that, the town comes alive. Animate devotion is surpassed unto grandiose might through communal dance, a powerful music enticing all to couple and find happiness in group intercommunication through a thankful greeting of sprites.

Then, chaos breaks loose from the fire. I disentangle the group of its emotional stability. I use a dull knife, a metal shard from their central structure. Cutting off hands and brazenly ambushing in an intoxicated insanity, bloodthirsty, I drive the community from their healthy nest. Only a few bodies remain, hanging onto life with the remaining ligaments and tendons still connecting their pulse, vibrating with accepted fate, a spiritual murder.

I flee. Following what I had learned in the village, I begin to collect seeds in the wilderness, these are jujus of flight. I need a new identity. I received wind of another African meeting, in the next town. Before I can get there, the Red Cross identifies me, soon to be incarcerated, deadened with madness I swallow the seeds. My flesh speaks of me, it says, “I am guilty.”

________

Murder

"If you commit murder, it signifies that you are engaging in some dishonourable adventure, which will leave a stigma upon your name...If you have a dream of murdering another, this is a warning that you must keep in control of your temper and emotions at all times and not get enraged to the point of murderous intent...You may also have some repressed anger at yourself or at others." (iDream)

________

clockwork porridge

clockwork porridge
spread over an island tongue
marauding, blasphemous
across seven oceans

timely
with education's pandemic drug:
the book

compromising home speech
on the First People's sand-quipped names
harboring love in their own unique hearts
with a history untold,
forgotten and enslaved to foreign grammar
to safekeep continued histories
of colonial struggle
in the vault of young minds
playing sound asleep
in the therapeutic mud
of their own beautiful creation.

March 7, 2011

Chinatown Calgary