Apart from reading it to know about the writer, you can read it to have a close (often insider's) view of people and historical events like: - independApart from reading it to know about the writer, you can read it to have a close (often insider's) view of people and historical events like: - independence and partition of India - Jawarlal Nehru - Krishna Menon - Meneka Gandhi and her fights with her mother - Emergency - death of Indira Gandhi - Bellwood personalities of time
People like RK Lakshman and Anita Desai also feature. As a person who has worked for India House, edited Hindustan Times, has been a Rajya Sabha member and a friend of Sanjay Gandhi, Khushwant Singh has a great deal to say about a great many things.
His account of different people seems mostly balanced. You could contend that it contains truth and even that it contains nothing but truth except occasional malice and a lot of gossip. As for love, there is very little of it - mostly in postscript. It's surprising that (except for post script written years later) there are very few mentions of Singh's wife for decades though it was a happy marriage. Strange, how little he mentions her or his children, even though one's family should probably be key plays in a memoir. I remember Orwell would frequently mention his wife often in his diaries.
Singh has more a thing about gossip which is why the book is full of stories about all sorts of people (not all of them famous).
Singh also has a thing for perverse and many stories involve sex. Also note, the first few chapters shall be of little interest if you want to read the book for historical celebrities. The best chapters are really the last few - including one of his views on religion and another on authors....more
"The fact that almost everybody writes poetry when in love proves that the resources of conceptual thinking are too poor to express their inner infini"The fact that almost everybody writes poetry when in love proves that the resources of conceptual thinking are too poor to express their inner infinity; inner lyricism finds adequate objectification only through fluid, irrational material. The experience of suffering is a similar case. You never suspected what lay hidden in yourself and in the world, you were living contentedly at the periphery of things, when suddenly those feelings of suffering which are second only to death itself take hold of you and transport you into a region of infinite complexity, where your subjectivity tosses about in a maelstrom. To be lyrical from suffering means to achieve that inner purification in which wounds cease to be mere outer manifestations without deep complications and begin to participate in the essence of your being."...more
The Perishable Empire is a collection of essays on a variety of topics but with the common thread of studying Indians' writing in English in differentThe Perishable Empire is a collection of essays on a variety of topics but with the common thread of studying Indians' writing in English in different ways. She studies authors like Bankim Chander Chattopadhyay, who wrote a single novel in English before he started writing in Bengala. Then she goes on to discuss several novelists from the twentieth century. The following are some of the arguments she makes along the way:
1. Writers writing in English until a few decades ago felt compelled to give a context and descriptions of Indian traditions - the audience for them was not local, and thus, authors feel compelled to give contexts.
2. Indian writers writing in English used to discuss foreign metaphors to describe India - using names of flowers or things not found in India but that has changed as Indian writers in the language have developed their own English language over time.
3. In recent times, the novelists that have grown to be tremendously popular are those writing on themes considered 'Indian'. You will, for example, be hard-pressed to find a novel in Booker lists that don't deal with quintessential Indian theme (casteism, partition, impact of colonialism, religion, poverty, etc.) and only centers around universal themes like love, sex, families, etc. It would be like if every popular work from Germany was about Nazi Germany.
She quotes Borges saying there are no camels in Quran, and that is what makes it a genuine Arabic text - camels were a part of everyday life to Arabs and nothing to write about. Only a foreigner writing an Arabic book might have forced them into his book. The problem with contemporary Indian novels written in English getting recognized in the west is that they have their metaphorical camels.
4. She argues that every work gaining notice in the west is considered an interpretation of India (you won't consider Atonement by McEwan an interpretation of India, but most Indian novels that have made it to the booker list are read in that way.)
5. The non-English novels also interact with various voices and cultures from India. The Tomb of Sand, written in Hindi, for example, has quotations from writers in several Indian languages, but that kind of intertextuality is missing in Indian novels written in English.
6. Almost novels that have grown popular in the west were written in English. The English translations of novels written in Indian languages have not been considered by the West when trying to understand India. That is not the case with, say, South America, from where it is writers like Marquez who have earned prestige from the translations of their works.
7. West might have preferred English novels over those translated into it because they give an idea of generic India and don't presume on readers' familiarity of local customs (writers anywhere writing with local readers in mind always presume on such knowledge).
8. The publishers have not made enough efforts to translate Indian novels in English and other Indian languages. (That might hopefully change with Tomb of Sand winning International Booker.)
9. In Indian novels written in English, there is also a false dichotomy where everything is divided into either western of Indian (with no mention of the rest of the world) - and Indian novels often elaborate on what sets India apart from the West. She argues that such novels create a generalized idea of India so that they can be easily read by people from different cultures compared to novels in other languages that only wrote about a specific community.
10. She talks about the decline in readership and writings in other Indian languages and points out that it is due to a lack of efforts by publishers to market these books as the market for Indian books is limited, and the number of readers in the languages might be declining. That might also be because the literature in these languages is not received well by literature departments (English Literature departments in Indian universities also don't like works translated from other Indian languages). The lack of interest by critics is another reason.
For me, one of the reasons for the decline in interest in the works in other languages is that they are also not available digitally, even for those that are in the public domain. That said, digital books probably weren't that big a thing in 2003 when this book was published. I wonder what she will have to say about the current Indian literary landscape.
She also discusses several excellent novels and novelists along the way - including Bankim Changer Chattopaday (who wrote almost the first Indian novel). Rabindranath Tagore, Toru Dutta, Sarojini Naidu, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Gosh, etc. Those discussions were quite fascinating....more
There is a Hindi saying that can be translated to effect that a poet can reach where sun won't - to show that there imagination is not limited like reThere is a Hindi saying that can be translated to effect that a poet can reach where sun won't - to show that there imagination is not limited like reality. While that may be so, the reach of imagination too is limited by limitations of mind using it. While imagining stuff, Human mind must work with its content - whether it be content from lived experience or something innate. Neither of those sources are unlimited. It must he therefore possible that all we do imagine can be limited to a few elements dressed differently.
And while some individuals might be able to imagine things undreamed of before; very nature of human language ensure that such fantastic ideas just can't be explained - because language itself is a set of symbols already agreed upon to represent predefined concepts ( as Borges points out in 'Aleph', a short story where he illustrates it rather beautifully). When Einstein gave theory of relativity, very few people on planet could grasp it; within a few years, the language to explain it was developed and anyone with a university degree in Physics understood it. Now just imagine what it would have been like had someone discovered same theory a century before Einstein. He just won't have language enough to start to explain it and probably would have been called mad.
Now myths are by nature very stories that almost an entire population not only understands but can also relate to - that is, they are stories that can make it to collective consciousness of whole community. This gives a space to a very small circle of ideas - not only are truly fantastic flights of human imagination but also other less relatable stories are unable to make the cut. Only stories that are relatable enough to generations of population to make them tell and retell are able to become myths.
Campbell picks up a few elements - initiation ceremonies, hero myth, creation myths, destruction myths, the mother figure, the father figure, the teacher figure, the saint figure etc and tries to explain that all myths of the world can be explained through these elements.
When I say 'world' above I mean it - he has studied myths from all the continents and countries; a rather herculean amount (intended). The very number of those that get mentioned in this book alone is impressive by all standards.
Given that there is a very strong relationship between myths and literature (literature really seems to be natural successor of mythology. Ancient Roman's and Greeks explained themselves and their ways by their myths. At begining of 20th century Russians explained themselves via Dostovesky and Tolstoy. The teenagers of beginning of 21st century English wold will tell you which house of Hogwarts school they belong to.); those patterns can be extended to literature too. Rabbit running down the hole is hero's call to another world for Alice, the play 'Hamlet' is mostly about its hero's struggle to choose between life he desires and life he is duty bound to live and Dumbledore is wise old man of Hero myth to Harry Potter.
That said Campbell never suggested that the story of any single mythological hero must through all those stages he mentioned. Most stories pass through some of them at best. That's right as well. The stages aren't so much stages that must follow one another in pre-defined routine as a list of elements that can be used in creating stories. Even one or two elements are enough. Kafka's The Castle for example completely ignores childhood or past of its hero.
Yet, if I am to believe some of the reviews written here - there are writers, including ones at Disney, trying hard to create stories with all the stages covered in their stories. And that's just really sad. This book is a very useful tool for Postmortem analysis of stories already written but it's a terrible guide (perhaps because it was never meant to) toward creating new stories and forcing them in directions that will just ruin them. Otherwise you are repeating just a single pattern over and over again. That's probably why I can't watch too many of Disney movies at once - the same introduction, conflict, resolution, happily ever after routines at repeat .... or maybe, who would have thought! I grew up. Highly doubt that last mentioned possibility though....more
Alexievich is probably the best choice Nobel prize for literature Committee has made in last decade (and there are likes of Ishiguru in that list). OnAlexievich is probably the best choice Nobel prize for literature Committee has made in last decade (and there are likes of Ishiguru in that list). One of reasons why her books work so powerfully awrsome seem to be that an average Russian seems to be quite well-read, easily quoting likes of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and other genuises of golden and silver age of Russian literature. I don't think that if some journalist was to do it in say USA (leave alone some developing world country) the people would be this eloquent or talking about Dostoveskian characters- though I won't be shocked if I was to learn that Alexivich heavily edited their accounts.
It is also probably the best book from her - Chernobyl Diaries and Zincy Boys were both awesome but this one has a much wider scope, and it is not so completely focused on suffering as the other two.
This books deserves an awesome review since I don't have energy or ability to write one, I will point to one here:
While Hedgehog and Fox dichotomy is interesting; at least for first half of the book I didn't know what that 'one big thing' that hedgehogs knew. For While Hedgehog and Fox dichotomy is interesting; at least for first half of the book I didn't know what that 'one big thing' that hedgehogs knew. For example, what was the one thing that Dostoyevsky knew?
As you read on, you get the idea that author is talking about some single system of values that explains it all. Thus Dostoevsky apparently had a single belief system that to him explained everything but Shakespeare had knew several systems? To be honest I still don't think Dostoevsky is hedgehog though. You could argue that most philosophers - Descartes, Nietzsche, Kant are or want to be. You could argue it for someone like Karl Marx or Darwin but I think most great novelists are really foxes; though authors like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are trying to hedgehog; and failing to find their single system. If Dostoevsky was to ever preach in a book, it would be in The Idiot. Myshkin, who is considered the character most similar to Dostoevsky, might be said to contain impersonate author's one big idea, but then he ends up crazy after failing to effect the change he stood for, proving that FD's big trick won't work in the real world. Dostoevsky's other books have characters similarly seeing their ideas defeated in real world. So it seems I don't agree with Berlin on that one. I do agree on Tolstoy though.
Tolstoy was definitely a fox trying to be hedgehog - which is book's main argument.
Another thing that bothers me is that even if an thinker may be popularly associated with a single value system, it doesn't necessarily mean that he is hedgehog. He may be invested in other ideas he didn't feel need to write on. Marx once said that he is not a Marxist. So go figure.
Also what if you don't have any tricks at all? Not many. Not one. None. What will you be then? That's the club I am going to end in....more
If only Sontag was alive today, there would be two more brilliant chapters (at least) about digital photography and selfie culture! Lots of what she dIf only Sontag was alive today, there would be two more brilliant chapters (at least) about digital photography and selfie culture! Lots of what she does say is true at an exponentially far greater level than it was at the time of writing. I got tons of quotes but not gonna share them - I am selfish that way....more
Got like 7500+ words in quotes I collected only. Can't share full review because of limits imposed by goodreads. This gonna be too big a long review. Got like 7500+ words in quotes I collected only. Can't share full review because of limits imposed by goodreads. This gonna be too big a long review. Chapter 1 The Depriciated Legacy of Cervantes
Milan Kundera draws a rough and brief sketch of history of novel. Kundera insists that the novels should do what only novels can do.
Can novels die? It has already happened "About half a century ago the history of the novel came to a halt in the empire of Russian Communism. That is an event of huge importance, given the greatness of the Russian novel from Gogol to Bely. Thus the death of the novel is not just a fanciful idea. It has already happened. And we now know how the novel dies: it's not that it disappears; it falls away from its history. Its death occurs quietly, unnoticed, and no one is outraged."
But it is not because the novels are useless "If the novel should really disappear, it will do so not because it has exhausted its powers but because it exists in a world grown alien to it."
The novels published in Soviet Russia are inconseqential: "By discovering nothing, they fail to participate in the sequence of discoveries that for me constitutes the history of the novel; they place themselves outside that history, or, if you like: they are novels that come after the history of the novel." Chapter 2 A Dialogue on the art of novel
Kundera here argues two adjectives - 'Psychological' and 'philosphical' can not be used for his novels. To be honest, as much as I understand his desire to avoid such labels - Nabhokov didn't like them either; Atwood doesn't like being feminist. I think most great authors won't have been fans of these labels. Such labels seem to arise of critics' analysing the books.
Kundera also debunks several misconceptions on the rules-of-thumb regarding how novels should be written - including psychological realism. Kundera appreciates it (it is defining quality of most of what I love in books) in that excessive importance given to it can be really limiting to what novels can do. He is more critical of 'so-called modern novels' of 21 st century and writing novels that are too historical. "Historiography writes the history of society, not of man. That is why the historical events my novels talk about are often forgotten by historiography. Example: In the years that followed the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the reign of terror against the public was preceded by officially organized massacres of dogs. An episode totally forgotten and without importance for a historian, for a political scientist, but of the utmost anthropological significance! By this one episode alone I suggested the historical climate of The Farewell Party." Part 3 Notes Inspired by "The Sleepwalkers"
Gonna have to read that book. Most underrated of all great novels of last century according to Kundera. "All great works (precisely because they are great) contain something unachieved. Broch is an inspiration to us not only because of what he brought off but also because of what he aimed for and missed."
"The unachieved in his work can show us the need for (1) a new art of radical divestment (which can encompass the complexity of existence in the modern world without losing architectonic clarity); (2) a new art of novelistic counterpoint (which can blend philosophy narrative, and dream into one music); (3) a new art of the specifically novelistic essay (which does not claim to bear an apodictic message but remains hypothetical, playful, or ironic)" Part 4 The Art of Composition
Another interview. First of all, the novel is like music which should have "Harsh juxtapositions instead of transitions, repetition instead of variation, and always head straight for the heart of things: only the note that says something essential has the right to exist. Roughly the same idea applies to the novel: it too is weighed down by "technique," by the conventions that do the author's work for him: present a character, describe a milieu, bring the action into a historical situation, fill time in the characters' lives with superfluous episodes; each shift of scene calls for new exposition, description, explanation. My own imperative is "Janacekian": to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic verbalism; to make it dense."
If you have read his books, you probably have noticed that his writings do try to cut to the main point. To make your work longer is so 19the century according to Kundera.
And then, here is something I hear a lot myself "Show, not tell". Kundera often speaks himself in his books, Rushdi does it too and I can understand why they should do so - the trouble is showing makes books bigger than they need be and "Even if I'm the one speaking, my reflections are connected to a character. I want to think his attitudes, his way of seeing things, in his stead and more deeply than he could do it himself."
And last, Kundera would have considered 'Games of thrones' and most of netflix series a farce. "C.S.: What does the word "farce" mean to you?
M.K.: A form that puts enormous stress on plot, with its whole machinery of unforeseen and exaggerated coincidences." Part 5 Somewhere Else "When Kafka read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends, everyone laughed, including the author"
Kundera discusses the meaning of word 'Kafesque'. This is best analysis I have found on Kafka even better than one provided by Camus in 'Myth of Sysphyus'. But then Kundera had the added advantage of having lived in Czech Republic which was highly Kafesque.
One quality of Kafesque is ability of powerful to make the punished feel guilty "One day, Amalia receives an obscene letter from a Castle official. Outraged, she tears it up. The Castle doesn't even need to criticize Amalia's rash behavior. Fear (the same fear our engineer saw in his secretary's eyes) acts all by itself. With no order, no perceptible sign from the Castle, everyone avoids Amalia's family like the plague.
Amalia's father tries to defend his family. But there is a problem: Not only is the source of the verdict impossible to find, but the verdict itself does not exist! To appeal, to request a pardon, you have to be convicted first! The father begs the Castle to proclaim the crime. So it's not enough to say that the punishment seeks the offense. In this pseudotheological world, the punished beg for recognition of their guilt!."
And the humor: "The comic is inseparable from the very essence of the Kafkan" .... "But it's small comfort to the engineer to know that his story is comic. He is trapped in the joke of his own life like a fish in a bowl; he doesn't find it funny. Indeed, a joke is a joke only if you're outside the bowl; by contrast, the Kafkan takes us inside, into the guts of a joke, into the horror of the comic."
Which worsens the tragedy: "the tragic more bearable by lightening the tone; it doesn't accompany the tragic, not at all, it destroys it in the egg and thus deprives the victims of the only consolation they could hope for: the consolation to be found in the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy."
There is a loss of solitude and privacy: "The Land-Surveyor K. is not in the least pursuing people and their warmth, he is not trying to become "a man among men" like Sartre's Orestes; he wants acceptance not from a community but from an institution. To have it, he must pay dearly: he must renounce his solitude. And this is his hell: he is never alone, the two assistants sent by the Castle follow him always. When he first makes love with Frieda, the two men are there, sitting on the cafe counter over the lovers, and from then on they are never absent from their bed. Not the curse of solitude but the violation of solitude is Kafka's obsession!"
USSR was heavily Kafesque in all these ways. But "Kafka made no prophecies. All he did was see what was "behind." He did not know that his seeing was also a fore-seeing. He did not intend to unmask a social system. He shed light on the mechanisms he knew from private and microsocial human practice, not suspecting that later developments would put those mechanisms into action on the great stage of History." Chapter 6 Sixty-three words "I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods."
A dictionary Kundera created to help his translators. "Obscenity. We can use obscene words in a foreign language, but they are not heard as such. An obscenity pronounced with an accent becomes comical. The difficulty of being obscene with a foreign woman. Obscenity: the root that attaches us most deeply to our homeland."
"Opus. The excellent custom of composers. They give opus numbers only to works they see as "valid." They do not number works written in their immature period, or occasional pieces, or technical exercises."
"Vulgarity: the humiliating submission of the soul to the rule of the down-below. The novel first undertook the immense theme of vulgarity in Joyce's Ulysses."
"Kitsch. Unknown in France, or known only in a very impoverished sense. In the French version of Hermann Broch's celebrated essay, the word "kitsch" is translated as "junk art" (art de pacotille). A misinterpretation, for Broch demonstrates that kitsch is something other than simply a work in poor taste. There is a kitsch attitude. Kitsch behavior. The kitsch-man's (Kitschmensch) need for kitsch: it is the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one's own reflection."
"Misomusist. To be without a feeling for art is no disaster. A person can live in peace without reading Proust or listening to Schubert. But the misomusist does not live in peace. He feels humiliated by the existence of something that is beyond him, and he hates it. There is a popular misomusy just as there is a popular anti-Semitism. The fascist and Communist regimes made use of it when they declared war on modern art. But there is an intellectual, sophisticated misomusy as well: it takes revenge on art by forcing it to a purpose beyond the aesthetic. The doctrine of engage art: art as an instrument of politics."
"The desire to be modern is an archetype, that is, an irrational imperative, anchored deeply within us, a persistent form whose content is changeable and indeterminate: what is modern is what declares itself modern and is accepted as such."
"Nonthought. This cannot be translated by "absence of thought." Absence of thought indicates a nonreality the disappearance of a reality. We cannot say that an absence is aggressive, or that it is spreading. "Nonthought," on the other hand, describes a reality, a force; I can therefore say "pervasive non-thought"; "the nonthought of received ideas"; "the mass media's nonthought"; etc.
"The moment Kafka attracts more attention than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins." Chapter 7 Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe "But what is that wisdom, what is the novel? There is a fine Jewish proverb: Man thinks, God laughs. Inspired by that adage, I like to imagine that Francois Rabelais heard God's laughter one day, and thus was born the idea of the first great European novel. It pleases me to think that the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God's laughter."
What is opposite of a novelist? an agelaste: "Francois Rabelais invented a number of neologisms that have since entered the French and other languages, but one of his words has been forgotten, and this is regrettable. It is the word agelaste; it comes from the Greek and it means a man who does not laugh, who has no sense of humor. Rabelais detested the agelastes. He feared them. He complained that the agelastes treated him so atrociously that he nearly stopped writing forever."
"No peace is possible between the novelist and the agelaste. Never having heard God's laughter, the agelastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are. But it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous agreement of others that man becomes an individual. The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin."
and most of self-claimed philosphers I have come across are agelaste. "The novel's wisdom is different from that of philosophy. The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor. One of Europe's major failures is that it never understood the most European of the arts—the novel; neither its spirit, nor its great knowledge and discoveries, nor the autonomy of its history. The art inspired by God's laughter does not by nature serve ideological certitudes, it contradicts them. Like Penelope, it undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before."
Another problem a novelist fights is 'received ideas'. Flaubert used to collect such ideas: "He put them into a celebrated Dictionnaire des idees regues. We can use this title to declare: Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas. Flaubert's discovery is more important for the future of the world than the most startling ideas of Marx or Freud. For we could imagine the world without the class struggle or without psychoanalysis, but not without the irresistible flood of received ideas that—programmed into computers, j propagated by the mass media—threaten soon to become a force that will crush all original and individual thought and thus will smother the very essence of the European culture of the Modern Era."
Kind of reminds me of most Modi-Bhakts who would go repeating whatever the few right wings organisations tell them. And the last enemy of novelist is kitsch "The word "kitsch" describes the attitude of those who want to please the greatest number, at any cost. To please, one must confirm what everyone wants to hear, put oneself at the service of received ideas. Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel. Today, fifty years later, Broch's remark is becoming truer still. Given the imperative necessity to please and thereby to gain the attention of the greatest number, the aesthetic of the mass media is inevitably that of kitsch"
Which is kind of my problem with most YA books....more
Schopenhauer assumes your having knowledge of Kant's philosophical system (I had only read Kant's Critique of (Based on my very limited understanding)
Schopenhauer assumes your having knowledge of Kant's philosophical system (I had only read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason) and his own doctoral thesis 'On the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason' which I might read next time I want to give this philosopher a try.
It seems to me that philosophers are mostly at their best when (1) When they are criticizing other philosophers (2.) when they are criticizing the ways through which we can 'know' anything.
His argument that very rules of logic were created more out of the convention by Greeks rather than some beautiful epiphany spoke directly to me.
As much as Socrates' dialogues can be amusing and give you food for thought, if you think his use of syllogism to win debates shows he was always right, then you put too much value on logic and reason. The world doesn't have to stand by our rules of logic. Even syllogisms. Hydrogen is combustible, oxygen too - combine them and you get water which is used to fight the fire. syllogism and other such rules of logic are only useful in worlds entirely dependent on such systems like mathematics. And even in mathematics, they don't seem to tell us a lot of new things except the interconnection between different patterns.
As much as I liked maths in school it bothered me to no end that we should have to 'prove' a geometrical theory like that angles of a triangle always adds to 180 degrees because it could be discerned by eyes and often you could use the theory to prove what you had earlier assumed as given. Schopenhauer has some best (and also ironically logically sound) arguments against such reasoning after Kant. Will and Representation
While I don't agree with the main theory itself which seemed to me like an exercise in creating an idea so minimal that you could use it to explain it everything; it is an interesting book.
You can understand the word 'will' in the same sense as it generally understood - desire, urge, etc. He says that the whole world has a single insatiable will - and it is basically what makes the world move. It is what makes birds create nests for offsprings they don't know yet they will have etc. Now if you know anything about Hindu philosophy, this assumption is important to them too. In fact, the Hindu word for God 'Paramatma' (figuratively 'prime soul') seems to mean as same thing as Schopenhauer's. Of course, you don't see the will in itself, only its representation - which in Hinduism is called 'Maya'. Yes, Schopenhauer was a big fan of Hinduism. Will is what operates behind the bird above and makes it act so (as far as I understand), representation is the bird you see. 'WIll' is me, 'representation' is my body. Book 1
The representation is held in our mind by the principle of sufficient reason which is basically arguing if something is there / occurs, it must have a cause or reason - another silly convention if you ask me.
What might be interesting to me is the idea of comparing Schopenhauer's theory of will as it manifests itself in living things to theories of Evolution. What Schopenhauer seems to try to explain in the behavior of animals through his idea of that single all-encompassing 'will'; is now probably explained by evolutionary incentives (such as how does an animal know that falling from a height might cause it an injury?). Schopenhauer's treatment of Will as something we are not conscious can be linked to the unconscious in the fields of psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung too. Book 2
Will is also what called the thing-in-itself (as against its representation in our mind). The whole world is one thing-in-itself and this unity (the one soul or Paramatma) is only seen as a number of entities because of time and space which are two forms of intuition and deceive us into seeing many differ Wills. Outside of time and space, we won't be able to differentiate among different things.
Add in here a lot of pessimism of religious philosophers. Since everything (including non-living things) have a will of itself, everything suffers too. And it must go on suffering till it wills which is why asceticism is awesome.
Not my favorite book. Book 3
My favorite part.
Kant talks about aesthetics. Art is an improved 'representation' of will's 'representation' in nature - the play within the play. You take a part of the representation of Will - the platonic idea (for example lakes, love, etc) and you contemplate it individually so as to stop willing (lose consciousness of your own desires) for a moment which in turn reduces suffering causing what is called aesthetic pleasure.
We have different capacities for this aesthetic pleasure and having a high capacity of the same makes you 'genius'. A genius then tries to communicate the aesthetic experience by creating copies of these 'ideas'. These copies of ideas are called works of art.
The above theory holds true for all arts (Schopenhauer has interesting things to say about a lot of art forms) with the sole exception of music. Music is not a copy of an idea. It is the same level as the original representation of the 'one' Will itself and yet offering us pleasure. For example when you paint a leave - there is a (level 1) WIll behind leave which can't be seen, (level 2) an original leave (the representation), (level 3) the idea of it in your mind and (level 4) the work of art or the copy of that idea in form of the painting. All arts are at level 4 but music is at level 2 and so closer to will. Despite being so close to the will, it offers just as much pleasure as the other art forms which do so by distancing us from the will.
If something pleases us by being 'beautiful' then it pleases us by tempting and feeding our desires (nudes, chocolates, and artworks depicting them). Like every preacher of asceticism, Schopenhauer too thinks that world is full of suffering and things that satisfy our desires (beautiful things) only tempt stronger desires in us. A 'sublime' pleasure, on the other hand, is derived when we struggle with our natural hostility to the object and this pleasure is thus driven by our getting closer to Will. Book 4
If you see things at the level of Representation (Maya), you develop egoism and egos clash and hence immoral actions, etc. To someone who sees beyond the representation of WIll, the whole world is One - his or her own suffering is not any different from that of any other; hence compassionate acts come naturally. Schopenhauer talks of suicide in detail which he thinks is basically running away from the problem manifestation of Will or its individual phenomena rather than fighting it which can only be done through asceticism. This book was boring too....more
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