schopenhauer + post-metal

last term i was studying Hegel (and i've nearly finished writing my dissertation about Hegel's Absolute - Aristotle or Fichte or something like that).. anyway after the genius of Immanuel Kant last year and beginning to get into Fichte (the bridge, along with Schelling, between Kant & Hegel), i figured i probably needed to complete my education in German Idealism by reading some Schopenhauer over the Christmas holiday.. wow.. Schopenhauer blew my mind (but note: along with Fredrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx, I've found myself unconvinced by pretty much everything almost every single one of these great Germany philosophers of the 19th century said, as well as being able to see some of the deeply destructive consequences of their thought in the world around me - but hey)..
anyway the main thing I want to comment on is Schopenhauer's philosophy of music.. really the point needs to be made against the background of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, so briefly:

Schopenhauer is easier to understand if you first take a crash course in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.. essentially Kant thinks the human subject constructs the world of experience around him by applying space and time as well as certain categories (substance, causality etc.) to the matter of objects in an a priori manner (i.e. we do so before we have had any experience of the external world).. in effect it's an Idealistic version of Aristotle's Form/Matter divide - the Form of an object being, simply, its shape/nature and its Matter the part of the object that sensibly affects us (i'm pretty sure Kant would rather his philosophy of been called Formal Idealism, as opposed to the Transcendental Idealism it has since become labelled).. an easy analogy is to think of our a priori subjective activity as a kind of 'cookie cutter' in which dough (ie an object's matter) is placed and given a certain shape by the cutter (in this case a spatial-temporal/causal shape).. Kant thinks that we cannot know objects as they are 'in-themselves' i.e. stripped of these subjective conditions we bring to bear on them a priori.. this divide means that there are almost two objects to consider when contemplating reality - the object as it is for us (or 'phenomena') in space and time and subject to causality and the object as it is 'in-itself' (or 'noumena'), stripped of space, time and the categories we apply to them.. for Kant we can know nothing of this realm of noumena, or objects as they are in-themselves - agnosticism is the default position here..

in essence this is the background Schopenhauer inherits and, with a few modifications, he remains a Kantian Idealist - the twist being that he thinks we can know the thing-in-itself.. he thinks this because all of our representations are in space, time etc. but at least one part of our experience is non-spatial and not subject to the categories - namely our own subjective existence - our existence as will.. this is in essence the idea of his most famous philosophical work The World as Will & Representation.. he agrees with Kant that the thing-in-itself cannot be in space or time or subject to the categories and if one of these categories is substance and through it we divide the world into many discrete individual substances then the thing-in-itself must be a non-plural undifferentiated spaceless, timeless unity.. so the thing-in-itself thus becomes in effect a monistic Will, which at root we are all manifestations of in some way.. the Will is also a purely objectless striving because, as a thing-in-itself, it has no object to will or desire (due to there being no seperate individual substances for it to aim at), but due to the spatio-temporal world of our creation the objectless striving becomes a ceaseless striving for the objects of the phenomenal world..

this means that we are almost condemned to will incessently for things that will never ultimately satisfy us - because the Will constantly strives for its desires to be satisfied and, once they are satisfied, it will begin desiring a new object once again and so on indefinately..

as you can probably guess this is the root cause of all our suffering in the world and schopenhauer thinks that the reason there is pain and suffering is because our transcendentally constructing intellect imposes division and multiplicity on the thing-in-itself when there is nothing but the absolute unity of the Will.. once this division is imposed upon it the Will, in effect, turns upon itself with its conflicting desires and strivings and causes the strife and suffering we see in the world around us. essentially it is we humans who are responsible for all the pain that is in the world because it is we who, through our a priori construction of the phenomenal world, fragment the Will and set it against itself by creating discrete individual substances which act in such a selfish manner..

as you can probably see his philosophy has somethings in common with certain strands of eastern thought - Hinduism and Buddhism especially, though it appears he arrived at these somewhat similair conclusions independently.
Schopenhauer's ultimate answer to the escape of suffering is to deny the Will via ascetic living and self-denial. we should all recognize that as we are all at root identical, nothing but manifestations of the Universal Will, we should have compassion on those suffering around us as if it was we ourselves who were suffering. but before all that he suggests that temporary release from the Will is to be found in aesthetic appreciation which allows the individual to leave behind his desires and enter a state of disinterested contemplation. Schopenhauer sees music as the highest form of aesthetic experience because music allows us to, as it were, see our emotions in an objectified form which then allows us to reflect upon the very nature of the Will without having to experience it directly and, thus, experience the suffering that comes with it.

now suffice to say i don't agree with much of Schopenhauer's metaphysics as obviously it implies atheism (actually i think alot of what he says is somewhat contradictory - but thats another matter), but the scope and sweep on his ideas are breathtaking and his idea of music objectifying our emotions as a temporary release of our suffering has always struck a chord with me (no musical pun intended)..
he would have been referring to classical music and i believe Richard Wagner took alot of inspiration from Schopenhauer's writings on this point and, indeed, Nietzsche's first great work The Birth of Tragedy is based around his love of Schopenhauer and Wagner..
for me this point has resonated mostly when listening to the genre known as post-metal.. ive also found something similair in some post-rock and also some classical music.. i'm sure the experience has probably come to me from other forms of music too, but it seems especially to originate in that kind of epic, intense and emotional music.. for me it is emotion objectified pure and simple: it is dense, crushing and beautiful all at once (who'd of thought beautiful and metal would of gone in the same sentence?)..
for me Isis' two albums Oceanic and Panopticon embody this more than anything else.. its as close as i've come to having a spiritual experience whilst listening to music and, it goes without saying, is impossible to truly capture in words.. i know alot of people, even those that are into metal, won't get what the whole Isis/post-metal thing is about - boring, too repetitive etc. but thats ok, not everyone's perfect :)

new perspective articles

just a couple of brief summaries of the NPP for anyone not familiar:

http://www.thepaulpage.com/Summary.html
http://www.thepaulpage.com/What.html

works righteousness and the NPP

a few years ago i was heavily into the teaching of men like n.t. wright and dwight pryor and, as a result, came to be an adherent of the so-called 'new perspective on paul'.. at the time i sort of brushed over the controversy surrounding it simply because i wasn't reformed and i could never understand some of their doctrines (like predestination etc. - which especially abhorred me).. since that time i have found a massive respect for the reformed tradition and would now consider myself a calvinist - john piper being instrumental in my mini-conversion (his work on romans 9 especially) as well as jonathan edwards, who i consider to be one of the greatest theological and philosophical minds to have ever lived.. there is a beauty and a glorious nature to the reformed doctrines of grace and it has a very systematic way of approaching the scriptures which appeals to a mind like mine.. but since that time the whole new perspective controversy has reared its head again with john piper writing a book in response to n.t. wright's theory of justification and, now wright is in turn writing a response to piper/carson etc., i've started looking at some of the issues again in light of what i've learned since i originally came across the new perspective..

at the moment i just want to look at the question of legalism and the way the reformed tradition considers paul to be attacking 'works righteousness' in his letters (especially romans & galatians).. i have to admit i still find it hard to accept that jews in the first century had a 'works righteousness' mentality and i still think its a caricature of judaism in general.. personally i think e.p. sanders' covenental nomism is still more or less correct - that jews were in the covenant by God's grace and mercy alone and they didn't have to 'earn their salvation'..

just looking at the old testament (or the tanakh) it seems obvious that jews never saw the law (hereafter Torah, due to 'Law's' somewhat negative connotations) as some kind of burdensome task that the Lord had made them accept (see Psalm 119: 'O how i love your Torah, i meditate on it all day''), nor does it make sense to say that God rescued Israel out of slavery in Egypt and took them to Mount Sinai in order to once again enslave them, this time to the 'Law' and its onerous requirements which they needed to keep in order to remain in covenant with the Lord.. it makes God look like a harsh taskmaster and makes his relationship to Israel look like a kind of abusive marriage..
according to Sanders convenental nomism says that Jews were already in the covenant with the Lord by his mercy and grace and the precepts of the Torah were supposed to be a joyful response to this grace.. they weren't earning their place in the covenant by doing any works, they were simply responding as any thankful Jew would to God's saving acts of the past..

this now leads to the question as to what Paul was referring to by 'works of the law' in his letters.. James Dunn's study of second temple Judaism lead him to the conclusion that 'works of the law' doesn't mean good deeds done to earn your salvation.. instead it means more or less covenental 'boundary markers' that show who was 'in' the covenant of Israel (kashrut/dietrary laws, sabbath observance and circumcision were the three main things that seperated Jews from their pagan neighbours).. these boundary markers had become something of an issue of pride for Jews of the first century, who used them as a kind of corporate boasting against the pagan nations..

Paul, then, is objecting to Jews (both believing and, according to scholars like Mark Nanos, also non-believing) requiring Gentile believer to take up these 'works of the law' in order to be considered a part of the covenant.. instead, as far as Paul is concerned, all they need to be a part of the covenant of Israel is faith in Jesus the Messiah of Israel - they don't have to become ethnic Jews..

the interesting thing is as far as i can tell John Piper more or less actually agrees with all of this - he doesn't believe God asked for works righteousness from the Jews.. he seems to think that, though the Law wasn't about earing your own salvation through works, it had nevertheless been turned into such a thing by the first century and so, in effect, Paul was talking about works-righteousness after all and so 'works of the law' does refer to such legalistic acts of righteousness trying to earn covenant.. what piper seems to be responding to mostly, however, is n.t. wright's reformulation of what righteousness and justification are.. wright has a more eschatological and corporately minded/ecclesiological view of it, while piper has in mind the more traditionally reformed individualistic and soteriological reading..
i'll try and look at this issue in more depth in another post..

schopenhauer vs. hegel

Schopenhauer on Hegel:

'If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.'

this quote made me crack up laughing when i read it.. and trust me after studying Hegel last term and spending most of the time struggling to understand even one sentence in the Phenomenology Schopenhauer has a point (the best thing about it all is that Schopenhauer deliberately timetabled his lectures so that they would clash with Hegel's when they were teaching at the same university)..

hopefully ill post about Schopenhauer and his philosophy of music soon..

the israel-nazi moral equivalence

last night i had a somewhat heated (yet still amicable) debate with a friend about the whole Israel-Palestine issue..
without going into details of the proceedings or my position on the recent conflict in Gaza (perhaps for another post) i was pretty disgusted when he essentially called Israel a 'Nazi state'..

the worrying thing is that this kind of rhetoric is now becoming common place amongst many people and not just your average left wing Sussex University student..
im wondering if people who make this kind of analogy a. really understand what they're saying and b. if they really believe it..

the reason this is a disgusting moral inversion is simply shown by just looking at the facts..
this article here (from 2007) lists all of the major world conflicts since 1950 and the amount of casualties involved..
notice that Israel-Palestine comes in at 49th with 51,000 deaths.. i think that roughly around a quarter to a third of these deaths are Israeli Jews but, for the sake of argument, even if every single one of these deaths was of a Palestinian Arab this is no way equates to 5-6 million Jews in 2-3 years ala the Holocaust ala the Nazis, which the state of Israel is now constantly being compared to..

go up the chart abit to number 39 - North Yemen 100,000 deaths from 1962-1970 - eight years of bloody conflict and i haven't even got a clue what it was all about..
or to put it into another perspective go down to number 61 on the list: 25,000 Palestinian Arab deaths at the hands of their fellow Arab neighbours the Jordanians, all more or less in one month (the infamous Black September)..
looking at all this it seems that if the Jews were really Nazis committed to the genocide of Arabs then if we're honest they've done a pretty bad job - only 51,000 deaths in 50 years..

last i remember it was Hamas in it's charter that was committed to the destruction of Israel and recently said it was justified in killing Jewish children all across the world.. that sounds more Nazish than anything i've heard coming officially from the state of Israel..

so what does all this 'Israel is a Nazi state' rhetoric really boil down to? personally i think Melanie Phillips has it spot on:
''the now common analogy that is drawn between Israel and the Nazis, or Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto, as used by such Israel-haters as George Galloway, Jenny Tonge, the British Muslim Initiative and others.. Its import lies in far more than its mere offensiveness and demonstrable barmyness. It is used for very specific political purposes. Since Nazism is totally beyond the pale – and since the Israel-haters believe, falsely, that Israel’s legitimacy rests upon the Holocaust – tarring it as a Nazi state delegitimises it and thus advances the agenda of its destruction.''

you dont have to fully agree with every Israeli policy or action to see this kind of talk is both dangerous and perverted

Jude

Possibly the best pragmatic yet stimulating talk I've heard in a while (in two parts).

http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Sermons/ByScripture/16/42_Learning_to_Pray_in_the_Spirit_and_the_Word_Part_1/

Enjoy.