…there is no necessity to invoke the rules of logic, nor to avoid a paralogism or to make a correct reasoning; the major logician of the world leaves them completely aside when really reasoning. “.
(SCHOPENHAUER, The World as Will and Representation, book i)
Recently, not just inspired by philosophy classes, but much more inspired by the investigation of my essence and my will’s fulfillment, I was back to Sartre’s and Schopenhauer’s readings. Sartre is the author of the famous quote: “Hell is other people”, in which he doesn’t condemn the existence of “others”, exactly, but rather says that, although “others” interfere with his projects, they give him reason to continue them.
Meanwhile, Schopenhauer lectures about this “will” on his most famous work “The World as Will and Representation.” He establishes this “will” as a negative, the “cause of all suffering, a perpetual chain of unfulflilled aspirations, which invokes pain of something which can never be attained.
We seek, we dedicate and desire. When our will has been broken and our plan has failed, we suffer. We are a network of people with different plans and desires, and to successfully fulfill all these desires in the same universal plane is impossible. This is Sarter’s “other” that prevents us from fulfilling our will. This variable and insatiable desire, which takes us from a state of euphoria to despondency, would be a fundamental force of nature which is manifested within man and throughout the universe, according to Schopenhauer.
Reading about “The World as Will and Representation” (a collection of 4 books published in 1819), I was reminded of the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky who, in 1983, released the fist edition of his book “L’ere du vide: Essais sur I’individualisme contemporain”, translated as “The era of the vacuum: Essays on contemporary individualism”.
Lipovetsky is a great theorist of the hypermodernity, a term created by him to talk about the frenetic and anxious rhythm of society today. Drawing a parallel to Schopenhauer’s theory, hypermodernity could be the exacerbation of desires, the culture of excess, always more, and the pinnacle of insatiability. For him, there was a hyperactivation of the modernity, which means there is no post-modernity, but a hypermodernity: “people of the hypermodernity society are hyperidivilualists. This is the concept. But what does hyperindividualism mean? It means that people are more responsible for their own existence. (…) They suffer from tighter schedules, sometimes at work, sometimes in their private lives. This makes the 21st century a century of conflicts, not between classes, but rather internal conflicts, inside them.” says Lipovetsky.
But if, on one hand, there is a pessimistic definition of will made by Schopenhauer, a point of view in which life isn’t rational and that we are conditioned by expressions of instinct and cosmic desire, on the other hand we have a definition made by Nietzche. According to Nietzche, will is a positive force that motivates people to face obstacles and overcome challenges, the path to human transcendence.
“And did you know… what the is world to me?… this world: a monster of force, without beginning, without end, a strong, overwhelming magnitude of force… an economy with no expense and loss, nor income or profit. But before becoming a force, at the same time it is one and multiple,… eternally changing, eternally repeating… coming from the simplest to the most complex, from the quietest, strongest, coldest, to the spiciest, wildest, most contradictory with itself. That’s my Dionysian world of forever-creating-ourselves, of forever-destroying-ourselves, without target, without desire… This world is the desire of power – and nothing more than that. You yourselves are also this desire of power – and nothing more than that!”
One day we fail, the other day we win.
Good or bad, it is the desire, the will, that allows us to keep going…