{"id":23057,"date":"2017-03-02T21:57:09","date_gmt":"2017-03-03T02:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23057"},"modified":"2017-03-02T21:57:09","modified_gmt":"2017-03-03T02:57:09","slug":"the-magic-lantern-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23057","title":{"rendered":"The Magic Lantern Show"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Magic Lantern Show<\/a><\/h3>\n

The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which we\u2019ve been discussing for the last three weeks, was enormously influential in European intellectual circles from the last quarter of the nineteenth century straight through to the Second World War.\u00a0\u00a0That doesn\u2019t mean that it influenced philosophers; by and large, in fact, the philosophers ignored Schopenhauer completely. His impact landed elsewhere: among composers and dramatists, authors and historians, poets, pop-spirituality teachers\u2014and psychologists.<\/p>\n

We could pursue any one of those and end up in the place I want to reach.\u00a0\u00a0The psychologists offer the straightest route there, however, with useful vistas to either side, so that\u2019s the route we\u2019re going to take this week. To the psychologists, two closely linked things mattered about Schopenhauer. The first was that his analysis showed that the thing each of us calls \u201cmyself\u201d is a representation rather than a reality, a convenient way of thinking about the loose tangle of competing drives and reactions we\u2019re taught to misinterpret as a single \u201cme\u201d that makes things happen. The second was that his analysis also showed that what lies at the heart of that tangle is not reason, or thinking, or even consciousness, but blind will.<\/p>\n

The reason that this was important to them, in turn, was that a rising tide of psychological research in the second half of the nineteenth century made it impossible to take seriously what I\u2019ve called the folk metaphysics of western civilization:\u00a0\u00a0the notion that each of us is a thinking mind perched inside the skull, manipulating the body as though it were a machine, and now and then being jabbed and jolted by the machinery. From Descartes on, as we\u2019ve seen, that way of thinking about the self had come to pervade the western world. The only problem was that it never really worked.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Magic Lantern Show The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which we\u2019ve been discussing for the last three weeks, was enormously influential in European intellectual circles from the last quarter of the nineteenth century straight through to the Second World War.\u00a0\u00a0That doesn\u2019t mean that it influenced philosophers; by and large, in fact, the philosophers ignored Schopenhauer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3463,14924,1758,658],"class_list":["post-23057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-archdruid-report","tag-arthur-schopenhauer","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23058,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23057\/revisions\/23058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}