Tuesday, October 04, 2005

I am rushing through a moving train. I have to tell Reloj something I've just read.

It was in Schopenhauer. See, the way I understand it, is, you cannot substitute one string of longing and desire for another. I see it as a golf ball. You cut into the cover and you unwind one length of thread and stretch it out on the table. Then you take another and you substitute it.
Schopenhauer says you can't do that. Any impulse or drive is so deeply rooted there is no way to synthesize another for it. I go to tell Reloj that, rushing through the cars, out one door onto the platform and into the next.

We are going to a therapy clinic somewhere up ahead which will cure Reloj of his smoking habit. One of the strategies is the trading off of the need to smoke with other oral fixations. But I found a copy of something from Schopenhauer which says we're bound to fail in our mission.

Sublimation? Is that the term?

Eyes are cast above me. I notice the glaze, all along the rows, in every car, and then I know the cause. There are TV sets up high to my left.
Nobody wants to talk Schopenhauer here.

Everyone is blankly staring, as in a trance. There is noise coming from the TV sets.

Anybody? They only stare at the sets up on railings, two to a car. They do not hear me. They do not even see me.

Does this mean perhaps Schopenhauer was wrong? It's good, if so, because maybe then Reloj can quit smoking after all.

I wonder when I'm awake if Schopenhauer ever wrote anything like that.

1 comment:

Woesong said...

Following is a discussion resulting from a question I posted in the USENET group alt.philosophy about this dream:

Doubting Timus wrote:
> I had a dreammmm the other night...
>
> Here it is, the entry for 4 Oct 2005:
>
> http://tremonius.blogspot.com/
>
> I've read little to no Schopenhauer, and I'm wondering if by chance there is
> anything in this dream relating to sublimation but not quite which might
> resonate anywhere in Schopenhauer?


Yes, much;

Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 - September 21, 1860) was a
German philosopher. He is most famous for his work The World as Will
and Representation. He is commonly known for having espoused a sort of
philosophical pessimism that saw life as being essentially evil,
futile, and full of suffering.

However, upon closer inspection, in accordance with Eastern thought,
especially Buddhist, he saw salvation, deliverance, or escape from
suffering in aesthetic contemplation, sympathy for others, and ascetic
living...

...Schopenhauer's starting point was Kant's division of the universe
into phenomenon and noumenon, claiming that the noumenon was the same
as that in us which we call Will. It is the inner content and the
driving force of the world. For Schopenhauer, human will had
ontological primacy over the intellect; in other words, desire is
understood to be prior to thought, and, in a parallel sense, "will" is
said to be prior to "being".

In solving/alleviating the fundamental problems of life, Schopenhauer
was rare among philosophers in considering philosophy and logic less
important (or "less effective") than art, certain types of charitable
practice ("loving kindness", in his terms), and certain forms of
religious discipline; Schopenhauer concluded that discursive thought
(such as philosophy and logic) could neither touch nor transcend the
nature of desire -- i.e., the will.

In The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer posited that humans living
in the realm of objects are living in the realm of desire, and thus are
eternally tormented by that desire (his idea of the role of desire in
life is similar to that of Vedanta-Hinduism and Buddhism, and
Schopenhauer draws attention to these similarities himself).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer