I believe it was Bertrand Russell who asked: if there is a "problem of evil" why is there not a "problem of good"? His answer was that there is a problem of evil only for those whose premises make evil seem anomalous. Following up that thought: If I believed that the world is the creation of the evil Cthulhu, designed to make us miserable and mad, why are there good and joyful moments? Why does Cthulhu let Bach's music slip through into ontology? Why are we allowed to take and feel such pride in our child's growth and accomplishments, if we are supposed to be miserable? My guess is that different Cthulhu-ists have different opinions. Schopenhauer's Will might be thought to raise the same question. But he might say that the Will preserves its own existence by preserving our generational cycles, so allowing the pride of parenthood is a necessary price the Will must pay to continue to have humans whom it can torture. As to music? it may have played a ro...
Posts
This is fun. It comes from 2014 but, heck, in the history of philosophy, what's four years? Flavorwire compiled a list of the harshest philosopher-on-philosopher insults in history. Here's the link: http://flavorwire.com/469065/the-30-harshest-philosopher-on-philosopher-insults-in-history Their number #1 was Schopenhauer on Hegel: "Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.” My personal favorite on the list is another dig at Hegel, coming though from Bertrand Russell: "Hegel’s philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its ab...
Music expresses, say, "heartbreak." It doesn't express, "the heartbreak you felt two years and a month ago, on that rainy Wednesday when...." Its essence, according to Schopenhauer, is to get to the essence, to leave aside the accidents. "Precisely this universality, exclusive as it is to music, together with the most exact precision gives music its high value as the panacea for all our suffering. Thus if music ties itself too closely to words or tries to model itself on events, it is trying to speak a language that is not its own. Nobody has avoided this error as completely as Rossini; which is why his music speaks its own language so clearly and purely that it has no need of words at all and retains its full effect when performed in instruments alone." That sounds rather equivocal praise for Rossini, who composed for opera, i.e. specifically for words and a stage set, not the concert halls Schopenhauer seems to have in mind here. Sti...