Ichcha and will

Schopenhauer has always attracted me with his unbelievable clarity. He does not beat around the bush but jumps in front and states his ideas in a crystal clear manner. This is great for us. We don’t have to knit our brows and toil dispiritedly along to divine the hidden meanings in the learned philosophical treatise.

We would not go into his theory here. The scope of the post does not permit it anyway, even if I can do it. But his ideas have amused me and had made me see things in a different perspective. It was amusing to see so much honesty and ego too in a philosopher. He also had a healthy distaste to the Icon’s of his time. Hegel was his favorite punching bag.

May be he was a little bit envious too, because Hegel was so popular.

To him world was his idea. There he was right of course whether it included Hegel or not. The world comes to us through our sensations and these sensations trigger certain things within the mind to form our idea of the world. Even the moderns are beginning to recognize this as truth.

I would back his theory on intellect any time. To him intellect is subject to desire or will and has little or scant use in a person’s life. He states somewhat that we do not want a thing because we have thought about it. It is the other way round, we think about a thing because we desire for it. To him the whole of human history is a drama enacted to prove this.

The will is a great subject with the ancient Indians too. It is known by the name of Ichchaa sakthi in India. Siva is said to personify it. The Indian metaphysicians may not have stressed the primary-ness of the will like Schopenhauer but they knew of its prime importance. It is Thamasic( massive, hidden) force in nature and is the base on which the other Sakthi’s ( The Jnana and Kriya Sakthi’s- reason and action) build their empires.

As I said there is more than enough evidence that the man knew of eastern thought before he ventured seriously into philosophy.

The will to him was the basic force of life. Everything else is subservient to it. He thinks that even the human body is fashioned by the will. He can only be right when he says that our needs for food, shelter, protection etc do not originate in thought. They are the result of desire (another word for will to Schopenhauer) and the intellect and our physical powers second it and work for their achievement.

I like his treatment of love. To him it is a deceit of nature. Love of course is eugenics, an action of universal will. It is an effort by nature to select the best specimens for reproduction. But I have reservation about the way he links the individual to the general. It’s a bad use of the theory of Maya.

He says somewhere that he was writing to state just one idea but has not found a simpler way to state it than to write a whole book about it. His pessimism did not leave him without a sense of humor anyway.

The man was highly egotistical. He thought a world about himself. He has openly stated that he was the next big thing after Kant in philosophy.

The man is highly amusing.