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/lit/ - Literature

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6374486 No.6374486 [Reply] [Original]

I argue that Schopenhauer is one of the most important thinkers of all time, not because of his PROJECT, but because of his outlook, his attitude.

Schopenhauer was completely and unambiguously in favor of clarity. He believed in writing so that your words would be understood, and he fought violently against people who thought otherwise.

Why is this important?

Why is Schopenhauer's attitude, which seems a bit obvious, valuable to us?

Because the battle he fought is so frequently NOT fought, because the threat he concerned himself with is so frequently underestimated.

Russell gave Schopenhauer a pretty hard time in his History Of Western Philosophy. And while I think his criticisms of Schoppy's project are on point, he misses this latent, never-quite-completely stated virtue in the man's work that actually was a precursor to Russell's own project. Schopenhauer was the first to put intellectual honesty and linguistic parsimony front and center as a philosophical concern. But where the analytics became obsessed with clarity to the point of being afraid to talk about anything other than pure logic, Schopenhauer's devotion to clarity never precluded him engaging with real, substantive issues. So Schopenhauer is actually better than the analytics.

Why is this important?

Well, think about the prototypical charlatan. His ruse, vagueness, allows him to evade capture in a way that the physical criminal, the thug, could never hope to match. We live in a world where thugs are generally dealt with and punished as they should be, but charlatans, snake oil salesmen, who may be just as much the criminal, are almost never brought to justice. Schopenhauer knew this all too well and for bringing the issue to light I think he deserves to be credited with an immensely powerful sensitivity and social conscience.

>> No.6374504

Agreed.

>> No.6374509

>>6374486

Is World as Will actually that clear?

>> No.6374510

But Hegel was right

>> No.6374540
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6374540

cool story breh

>> No.6374547

Berkeley did this over a century earlier. Get on the Bishop's level.

>> No.6374551

>>6374547
Can't BTFO the Bishop!

>> No.6374604

>>6374486
>Russell gave Schopenhauer a pretty hard time in his History Of Western Philosophy.

kek, he completely misrepresented a lot of continental philosophy in that book, but what to expect from an autismo.

>> No.6375000
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6375000

>>6374604
You can't really misinterpret pseudo-intellectual posturing.

>> No.6375180
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6375180

>Schopenhauer was completely and unambiguously in favor of clarity. He believed in writing so that your words would be understood, and he fought violently against people who thought otherwise.

Hume, Berkeley, Locke, Montaigne, and plenty of other philosophers wrote even clearer than Schopenhauer. Kant's writing is difficult to understand but Schopenhauer saw its merit. Some philosophers just have different styles of writing. Some philosophers deal with subjects that are more difficult to write about than what Schopenhauer wrote about. Some philosophers introduce new vocabularies than overthrow the old language game and help us see everything in a new light.

Also, just because Schopenhauer wrote in an easy-to-understand form, it doesn't mean he wasn't a charlatan. You can write clearly and still be a charlatan, especially if your system is full of holes and you are conscious of the fact. For example, try to find in Schopenhauer an explanation of the origin of intellect. How does he deal with the obvious fact that before the appearance of the intellect, the law of causality was already in motion, creating the organisms we evolved from? He will not touch that topic because, if he did, it would put his whole system into question. With the way he attacks Hegel on one hand and brags about his "prize essays" on the other, it seems like Schopenhauer was more concerned with fame and recognition than he was in "seeking the truth."

>> No.6375215

Schopenhauer who used intentionally switch languages mid sentence to weed out the uneducated and revised WaWaR for years and still had to publish it in volumes? Yeah, I think he would demand the intellectual modesty of you admitting you don't know what parsimony is.