{"id":23169,"date":"2017-03-09T13:17:34","date_gmt":"2017-03-09T18:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23169"},"modified":"2017-03-09T13:17:34","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T18:17:34","slug":"how-should-we-then-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23169","title":{"rendered":"How Should We Then Live?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.at\/2017\/03\/how-should-we-then-live.html\">How Should We Then Live?\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which we\u2019ve been discussing for several weeks now, isn\u2019t usually approached from the angle by which I\u2019ve been approaching it\u2014that is, as a way to talk about the gap between what we think we know about the world and what we actually know about it. The aspect of his work that usually gets all the publicity is the ethical dimension.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s understandable but it\u2019s also unfortunate, because the ethical dimension of Schopenhauer\u2019s philosophy is far and away the weakest part of it. It\u2019s not going too far to say that once he started talking about ethics, Schopenhauer slipped on a banana peel dropped in his path by his own presuppositions, and fell flat on his nose. The banana peel in question is all the more embarrassing in that he spent much of the first half of\u00a0<em>The World as Will and Representation<\/em>\u00a0showing that you can\u2019t make a certain kind of statement without spouting nonsense, and then turned around and based much of the second half on exactly that kind of statement.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s review the basic elements of Schopenhauer\u2019s thinking. First, the only things we can experience are our own representations. There\u2019s probably a real world out there\u2014certainly that hypothesis explains the consistency of our representations with one another, and with those reported by (representations of) other people, with less handwaving than any other theory\u2014but all the data we get from the world out there amounts to a thin trickle of sensory data, which we then assemble into representations of things using a set of prefab templates provided partly by our species\u2019 evolutionary history and partly by habits we picked up in early childhood. How much those representations have to do with what\u2019s actually out there is a really good question that\u2019s probably insoluble in principle.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How Should We Then Live?\u00a0 The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which we\u2019ve been discussing for several weeks now, isn\u2019t usually approached from the angle by which I\u2019ve been approaching it\u2014that is, as a way to talk about the gap between what we think we know about the world and what we actually know about it. [&hellip;]<\/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":[7],"tags":[3463,1758,14975],"class_list":["post-23169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-archdruid-report","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-schopenhauer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23169","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=23169"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23170,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23169\/revisions\/23170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}