The world is my idea. This proposition is a truth for every living and thinking being, though only Mankind can bring it to the state of abstract and reflective knowledge. When he really does so, one can say that the philosophical spirit has been born in him. He is then absolutely certain that he is acquainted with neither a sun nor an earth, but only with an eye that sees a sun, a hand that touches an earth.
If that isn’t the most entrancing opening lines of any non-fiction tome , I don’t know what surpasses it. Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation is a masterpiece first released in 1818. His foundational metaphysical concept of ‘will’, the blind driving force intrinsic to all matter, not just living things, is the extension of Aristotle’s telos, and heavily influenced Nietzsche’s ‘will-to-power’, Bergson’s ‘elan vital’, and Freud’s ‘libido’.
Although Schopenhauer is oft-conceived as a dour misanthrope, that is mostly unfair. He was not a philosopher of death, but rather a lifelong habitue of the search for truth, with the keenest sense of the uncertainty of consciousness, the vicissitudes of subject vs. object,….and above all how we struggle with the ‘conditions of knowledge’, as Houellebecq notes.
It was Schopenhauer who developed Immanuel Kant’s thesis that there is no such thing as time or space (the first quantum theorist?). Time and space are just constructs built into our brain’s perception structure (the waffle iron molding what is batter into a shape). Example – we can think of events without time, but not time without events,……we can think of objects without space, but not space without objects. That’s because time and space don’t exist as distinct ‘things’. Consciousness and cognition, our deserved idee fixe, so: a) first attachment from our colleagues McAdams and Berube, an excellent summary of neonatal encephalopathy, and b) cognitive decline in Baby Boomers endangering retirement assets,..….quick – count backward from 100 by 7 as fast as you can.
Joe Kaempf, MD
District VIII Oregon Representative
Portland, OR
Volume 13, Number 19
wonderful offerings. NE and therapies still a challenge. The morphine accumulation information is sobering.
Agree with the baby boomer article. Finally got an outside adviser.