The Grey Man
το φως εν τη σκοτια φαινει
It's everywhere
It's Atman and Maya
Yang and Yin
Psyche and physis
The soul and nature
The Cartesian substances, mind and matter
Spinoza's thought and extension
Locke's secondary and primary qualities
Leibniz's simple substance and the multitude within it
Kant's noumenon and phenomena; the subject and the objects of experience
The frame of reference and motion in relativistic physics
The whole and its parts as spoken of by the 'gestalt' psychologist Kurt Koffka
Men have, at all times and in all places of the world, thought about a unity that combines a multiplicity because there is nothing else for us to think about. Cogito ergo sum; what we think about is what we are, and what we are, to the very last, is a combination of things reciprocally individuated by their oppositions to each other—polar relations of right-to-left, before-to-after, warm-to-cold, light-to-dark, and red-to-green to name a few. Each of these multiple physical dualities is a mirror to the unitary metaphysical 'duality of dualities' between the multiplicity itself and the unity that it constitutes.
In all moments are we confronted with these dualities—we can no more escape them than we can escape ourselves. We can, however, call them by their proper names—we can represent the multiplicity, whole and entire, with symbols, thereby furnishing a microcosm: such is the vocation of the philosopher. Philosophers are themselves individuated by what side of the existential looking glass they represent—those who speak of the physical world are physicists or natural philosophers, those who speak of the metaphysical metaphysicians or philosophers in the strict sense.
In the Western world, the whole ear of the philosophical laity has been rankly abused since the ascension of the industrial system to dominate our economic life in the 19th century. In our zeal to enrich ourselves by increasing our capacity to manufacture goods from readily available materials, we have submitted ourselves to a most lamentable intellectual poverty; concurrent with the division of labour needful to increase our material productivity has been a division of intellectual labour needful to maintain and expand that physical microcosm furnished by natural philosophy which has borne all the technical discoveries that made that increase possible. The result has been a specialization of thought to match our specialization of labour; gone are eagles like Leibniz who command the entire landscape of Western knowledge from on high, replaced by creepers who jealously cling to the parochial patches of dirt that they claim as their "fields of study." What a falling off was there!
Now, even as the special physical sciences are lauded by the learned for their continued contributions to our technical knowledge and thereby our material wealth, metaphysics is mocked as a medieval relic, and those creepers who would pose as its heirs do little to salvage its reputation. Since the 20th century, the philosophical legacy that extends from Charlemagne and Scotus Erigena to Frederick the Great and Kant has been all but forgotten, buried under a mountain of superfine obscurantist pedantry heaped up to advance the careers of good-for-nothing university professors to whose hearts "love of wisdom" is no closer than to that of the dullest manual labourer. So sordid is the state of academic philosophy that I can scarcely disagree with the eminent physicist Hawking when he says that philosophy is dead and people like him "the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge."
In my search for a metaphysician who would call the duality of dualities by its proper name, I was forced to hearken back to a time before the intellectual flame of the West was smothered by the materialistic philistinism of the industrial system. There, in the Germany of Goethe and Beethoven—two men who, more than any other, represent the very apogee of Western culture—did I find my teacher, as did Nietzsche before me. There did I find the man who, alone among all the philosophers of the Western canon, dared to call the dual existential principles of unity and multiplicity by their proper names: Wille und Vorstellung.
When one looks in the mirror, does one see oneself or someone else?
Animals think that it is someone else that they see and children think that they see themselves, but we who know the true meaning of the above-quoted saying of Descartes know that the proper answer is both and neither—when one looks in the mirror, one sees a duplicate of one's body.
Just as each physical duality is a mirror to the metaphysical duality between their multiplicity and the unity that combines them, so is the duality between one's body without and its duplicate within the physical looking-glass the representation par excellence of this existential looking-glass, a microcosm in itself. Looking in the mirror teaches us that we both are and are not our bodies, for though the self combines a multiplicity of individuated things, still the unity suffers no duplication. But still we do not learn. The language of the mirror is too austere, its symbolism too esoteric for us to readily avail ourselves of it. Our teacher must needs be a man like us, our interpreter, if you will, between our language and that of the world.
This teacher came to us in 1818, when the union of one man's insuppressible love of wisdom and the robust literary tradition of the West produced a prosaic masterpiece that has never yet been equalled in its lucidity and catholicity. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer complements Kant's work in identifying the unity and the multiplicity as the dual principles of existence by identifying the latter as a mirror to the former. Elucidated in plain terms at last is the solution to the "riddle of existence" which had already been discovered by the Vedic sages of India, thereby bridging the gulf between Eastern and Western thought.*
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason teaches us that we have both a phenomenal and a noumenal character; we exist both as a body—one of a multiplicity of things which are reciprocally individuated by their polar relations to each other—and as a unity which combines a multiplicity. The sage of Königsberg had thus already discovered that thought and thinker were one by the time Schopenhauer was ready to pen his magnum opus; all that remained for the latter was to illuminate the nature of the relationship between the two. In doing so, he was forced to reckon with the considerable progress that natural philosophy had already made in representing some of the persistent patterns exhibited by polar relations—in discovering some of those natural laws which govern the physical world, also known as causality.
Do men have free will, or are we bound to follow natural laws?
Block-headed optimists think that we are free, while mean-minded misanthropes think that we are slaves to causality; once again, the proper answer is both and neither—we are what we will.
The will has a dual character corresponding to the dual principles of existence: multiplicity and unity.
The phenomenal character of the will is integral to nature and thus no less bound to natural laws than anything else within it; indeed, one's body is merely an embodiment of causality, a multiplicity of polar relations whereby things are individuated from each other.
The noumenal character of the will is the integrating principle of nature and for this very reason transcends its laws; causality is merely the individuating principle whereby a multiplicity of things is combined into a unity, which is itself beyond individuation.
Why do we call the government of the multiplicity by natural laws and its combination by the unity alike by the selfsame name of 'act'? Because whatsoever exists acts. Do not ask what is an act, for there is no answer. It is
* Schopenhauer is thus to be credited with first translating the ancient Indian doctrine of the identity of Atman and Brahman in the language of Western philosophy; that today's fraudulent "philosophers of the mind", determined to exploit the credulity of their intellectually impoverished contemporaries in order to achieve fame, plagiarize Schopenhauer with their anemic talk of the unity as "the intrinsic nature of the physical" (Chalmers) and of the multiplicity as the "identity between phenomenological properties of experience and informational/causal properties of physical systems" (Tononi) even as they blithely ignore Kant and act as if nobody had thought about mind and matter before them, need not concern us here.
It's Atman and Maya
Yang and Yin
Psyche and physis
The soul and nature
The Cartesian substances, mind and matter
Spinoza's thought and extension
Locke's secondary and primary qualities
Leibniz's simple substance and the multitude within it
Kant's noumenon and phenomena; the subject and the objects of experience
The frame of reference and motion in relativistic physics
The whole and its parts as spoken of by the 'gestalt' psychologist Kurt Koffka
Men have, at all times and in all places of the world, thought about a unity that combines a multiplicity because there is nothing else for us to think about. Cogito ergo sum; what we think about is what we are, and what we are, to the very last, is a combination of things reciprocally individuated by their oppositions to each other—polar relations of right-to-left, before-to-after, warm-to-cold, light-to-dark, and red-to-green to name a few. Each of these multiple physical dualities is a mirror to the unitary metaphysical 'duality of dualities' between the multiplicity itself and the unity that it constitutes.
In all moments are we confronted with these dualities—we can no more escape them than we can escape ourselves. We can, however, call them by their proper names—we can represent the multiplicity, whole and entire, with symbols, thereby furnishing a microcosm: such is the vocation of the philosopher. Philosophers are themselves individuated by what side of the existential looking glass they represent—those who speak of the physical world are physicists or natural philosophers, those who speak of the metaphysical metaphysicians or philosophers in the strict sense.
In the Western world, the whole ear of the philosophical laity has been rankly abused since the ascension of the industrial system to dominate our economic life in the 19th century. In our zeal to enrich ourselves by increasing our capacity to manufacture goods from readily available materials, we have submitted ourselves to a most lamentable intellectual poverty; concurrent with the division of labour needful to increase our material productivity has been a division of intellectual labour needful to maintain and expand that physical microcosm furnished by natural philosophy which has borne all the technical discoveries that made that increase possible. The result has been a specialization of thought to match our specialization of labour; gone are eagles like Leibniz who command the entire landscape of Western knowledge from on high, replaced by creepers who jealously cling to the parochial patches of dirt that they claim as their "fields of study." What a falling off was there!
Now, even as the special physical sciences are lauded by the learned for their continued contributions to our technical knowledge and thereby our material wealth, metaphysics is mocked as a medieval relic, and those creepers who would pose as its heirs do little to salvage its reputation. Since the 20th century, the philosophical legacy that extends from Charlemagne and Scotus Erigena to Frederick the Great and Kant has been all but forgotten, buried under a mountain of superfine obscurantist pedantry heaped up to advance the careers of good-for-nothing university professors to whose hearts "love of wisdom" is no closer than to that of the dullest manual labourer. So sordid is the state of academic philosophy that I can scarcely disagree with the eminent physicist Hawking when he says that philosophy is dead and people like him "the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge."
In my search for a metaphysician who would call the duality of dualities by its proper name, I was forced to hearken back to a time before the intellectual flame of the West was smothered by the materialistic philistinism of the industrial system. There, in the Germany of Goethe and Beethoven—two men who, more than any other, represent the very apogee of Western culture—did I find my teacher, as did Nietzsche before me. There did I find the man who, alone among all the philosophers of the Western canon, dared to call the dual existential principles of unity and multiplicity by their proper names: Wille und Vorstellung.
When one looks in the mirror, does one see oneself or someone else?
Animals think that it is someone else that they see and children think that they see themselves, but we who know the true meaning of the above-quoted saying of Descartes know that the proper answer is both and neither—when one looks in the mirror, one sees a duplicate of one's body.
Just as each physical duality is a mirror to the metaphysical duality between their multiplicity and the unity that combines them, so is the duality between one's body without and its duplicate within the physical looking-glass the representation par excellence of this existential looking-glass, a microcosm in itself. Looking in the mirror teaches us that we both are and are not our bodies, for though the self combines a multiplicity of individuated things, still the unity suffers no duplication. But still we do not learn. The language of the mirror is too austere, its symbolism too esoteric for us to readily avail ourselves of it. Our teacher must needs be a man like us, our interpreter, if you will, between our language and that of the world.
This teacher came to us in 1818, when the union of one man's insuppressible love of wisdom and the robust literary tradition of the West produced a prosaic masterpiece that has never yet been equalled in its lucidity and catholicity. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer complements Kant's work in identifying the unity and the multiplicity as the dual principles of existence by identifying the latter as a mirror to the former. Elucidated in plain terms at last is the solution to the "riddle of existence" which had already been discovered by the Vedic sages of India, thereby bridging the gulf between Eastern and Western thought.*
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason teaches us that we have both a phenomenal and a noumenal character; we exist both as a body—one of a multiplicity of things which are reciprocally individuated by their polar relations to each other—and as a unity which combines a multiplicity. The sage of Königsberg had thus already discovered that thought and thinker were one by the time Schopenhauer was ready to pen his magnum opus; all that remained for the latter was to illuminate the nature of the relationship between the two. In doing so, he was forced to reckon with the considerable progress that natural philosophy had already made in representing some of the persistent patterns exhibited by polar relations—in discovering some of those natural laws which govern the physical world, also known as causality.
Do men have free will, or are we bound to follow natural laws?
Block-headed optimists think that we are free, while mean-minded misanthropes think that we are slaves to causality; once again, the proper answer is both and neither—we are what we will.
The will has a dual character corresponding to the dual principles of existence: multiplicity and unity.
The phenomenal character of the will is integral to nature and thus no less bound to natural laws than anything else within it; indeed, one's body is merely an embodiment of causality, a multiplicity of polar relations whereby things are individuated from each other.
The noumenal character of the will is the integrating principle of nature and for this very reason transcends its laws; causality is merely the individuating principle whereby a multiplicity of things is combined into a unity, which is itself beyond individuation.
Why do we call the government of the multiplicity by natural laws and its combination by the unity alike by the selfsame name of 'act'? Because whatsoever exists acts. Do not ask what is an act, for there is no answer. It is
* Schopenhauer is thus to be credited with first translating the ancient Indian doctrine of the identity of Atman and Brahman in the language of Western philosophy; that today's fraudulent "philosophers of the mind", determined to exploit the credulity of their intellectually impoverished contemporaries in order to achieve fame, plagiarize Schopenhauer with their anemic talk of the unity as "the intrinsic nature of the physical" (Chalmers) and of the multiplicity as the "identity between phenomenological properties of experience and informational/causal properties of physical systems" (Tononi) even as they blithely ignore Kant and act as if nobody had thought about mind and matter before them, need not concern us here.
