Samsara

From the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Sometimes I think that the greatest achievement of modern culture is its brilliant selling of samsara and its barren distractions. Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists. And to think that all this springs from a civilization that claims to adore life, but actually starves it of any real meaning; that endlessly speaks of making people "happy", but in fact blocks their way to the source of real joy. 

This modern samsara feeds of an anxiety and depression that it fosters and trains us all in, and carefully nurtures with a consumer machine that needs to keep us greedy to keep going samsara is highly organised, versatile, and sophisticate; it assaults us from every angle with its propaganda, and creates an almost impregnable environment of addiction around us. The more we try to escape, the more we seem to fall into the traps it is so ingenious at setting for us. As the eighteenth century Tibetan master Jikme Lingpa said: Mesmerized by the sheer variety of perceptions, beings wander endlessly astray in samsara's vicious cycle. 

Obsessed, then, with false hopes, dreams and ambitions, which promise happiness but lead only to misery, we are like people crawling through an endless desert, dying of thirst. And all that this samsara holds out to us to drink is a cup of salt water, designed to make us even thirstier.

The Superman vs. Weltschmerz

Nietzsche vs. Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer's concept of cosmic pain (Weltschmerz) and his philosophy of compassion (Mitleid), explore the human experience of empathy, and thus to our interconnectedness as human beings. 

Despite of Nietzsche's admiration for Schopenhauer, Nietzsche was strictly against his philosophy of pity. Even though it is known that Nietzsche aimed at transvaluing all values, one still wonders how one could possibly resent such a beautiful idea. 

Nietzsche however, believed that feelings of compassion only weakened the possibility to become a Superman (Übermensch). For him, the Superman is not someone with super-magical powers, but one who has transcendent the ego completely. In order to reach this state of mind, the individual has to surpass three stages. First, there is "the camel" with it's burden on it's back. Carrying the weight of the world, he eventually reaches the stage of the lion in which no more suffering exists, but total control, will power and strength. The final stage however, has surpassed all these conscious and ego ridden stages and results in the blissful state of "the child". This stage can be compared to the Golden Age, in which we see the wonders of the world with the innocence of childlike eyes.

As Nietzsche believed to carry the pain of the world on his shoulders, he chose to live in solitude in the Swiss Alps for several years. Here, according to his three stages, he found himself to be in the stage of the camel, indulging on his calamity. When he eventually believed to have surpassed this stage, he was ready to become the lion, and thus to re-socialise in order to teach his philosophy, just as the prophets had done before him after their enlightenment in solitude. In the form of Zarathustra, he finally walks down from his ivory tower in the mountains, but only to find that the first villagers he speaks to have no ears to listen! Nietzsche never reached the last stage on the way to transcend and become the Superman. Instead, he escaped from the conscious state of mind that he intended to surpass with his forthcoming insanity. 

From 'Žižek!'

Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

Slavoj Žižek in Žižek! (2005)

Wittgenstein on Mysticism

In his first and last work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein was primarily concerned with the logic of language. For him, it was only logical language expressed through physics and mathematics that could answer philosophical questions (and he believed to have solved all of them). This approach made anything else illogical and hence irrelevant to mention, even though these subjects were anything but irrelevant in themselves.
Such subjects were questions of religion and mysticism that might have been incoherent in the means of logic, but that nonetehelss were the most crucial part of our human experience. His criticism of language demands for a clarity of speech that encourages only to communicate that which is logically deductible, and to remain silent over that which can only be experienced.
Some of those mystic experiences he describes are faith and confidence in the face of hardships, as the WWII certainly was for him. With his realization that "Whatever happens, nothing can happen to me", Wittgenstein expresses a profound sense of security that could not even be shattered in the face of hardships. Whatever the circumstances were, he managed to find miracles that do not reflect on "...how the world is, but that the world exists", converging himself to the philosophy of wonder. Wittgenstein thus calls to focus on the present, as the past is already gone and the future is uncertain anyway. That the world exists, is a present in itself, so that for those who can not appreciate and feel the mystic moment of the presence by themselves, it is impossible and arduous to explain in abstract words. Hence, the unmentionable is building the foundation for Wittgensteins philosophy of silence, with which he is yet able to communicate the ineffable. Or to say it in Goethe's words: "A thinking man's greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed".