Philadelphia Philosophy Meetup

(Note this is an in person event. An online event is posted here.) The complicated relationship between philosophy and the arts begins with Plato, a literary genius who was suspicious of art as a potential siren song, but who nonetheless found an important role for beauty in his conception of the philosophical life. Last month we explored both Plato's celebration of beauty and his suspicion of poetry.
Now it turns out that there is a major philosopher whose work is in direct dialogue with that of Plato's, that nonetheless comes to the opposite conclusion about the arts. Where Plato despaired of Art's ability to communicate anything about ultimate reality, given its preoccupation with particulars and appearances, the strange and irascible Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the most influential of 19th century German philosophers, celebrated the arts and especially music as both providing us knowledge of universals, and as forms of disclosure of the ultimate nature of reality.
Born the son of a wealthy merchant, Schopenhauer’s iconoclastic and morose temperament never easily integrated with academic life, nor did his contempt for the ascendant star of Hegel, and like Kierkegaard, he was able to write by living relatively simply on the proceeds of an inheritance. Inspired both by Kant, and by works of Hiindu and buddhist philosophy, Schopenhauer developed a metaphysics In which Kant's conception of the world as we know it as being partially constructed by the structures of the human mind, was united with the suggestions found in Hindu philosophy that the world as we know it is a sort of mirage concealing the reality of a single kind of substance, the nature of which is clouded by our physical lusts and desires.
Schopenhauer identified this substance, which can only be intuited and not directly represented, with an irrational striving and forceful energy that he identified as the will. The tragedy of existence is that this striving is essentially doomed to dissatisfaction since all the objects that it can pursue are actually self-generated manifestations of itself and are likewise striving towards nothing in particular, are blind striving and effort itself. The result is that we are doomed to dissatisfaction and even to war with others, as long as we imagine that our desires can be satisfied. To recognize this, and to realize the futility of desire, is the highest ethical realization available for human beings.
One of the prime means of temporary liberation from the suffering of existence is to be found in art. For Schopenhauer argues that art, and it's disinterested contemplation of the structure of existence, liberates us from our individuality and our endless desires and allows us to experience a contemplative state where we experience reality and its structure , thus ultimately the will and its patterns of manifestation, without desire. It is this structure of reality that Schopenhauer associates with Platonic forms and making contemplative contact with such forms and their unfolding constitutes the essence of aesthetic contemplation
This peculiar kind of perception which allows us to be liberated from a futile world of violence, struggle and suffering, finds its culmination in music, which Schopenhauer claims to be the most perfect expression of the reality of the will, and therefore the symbolic means of communication of the deepest truths of existence.
And it is this peculiar emotionally charged vision of art as as a vehicle of metaphysical transcendence and truth, and this peculiarly bleak vision of a universe that is a manifestation of a desolate and futile kind of restless energy that would have a profound influence on future 19th century Culture, from the works of Nietzsche and Wagner, to Leo Tolstoy, to modern culture critics, the early Wittgenstein, and the early existentialists and nihilists. In this Meetup, we wish to explore this vision of aesthetics and its consequences, examining Schopenhauer's core exposition of it in his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation.
links to reading are here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HC4Rvg10IrNQ204ua1GJcxQFAUFN3Qub/view?usp=sharing

September 13 - We are reading NE X.9 (1179a33–1181b23), at least the first third. Aristotle turns his attention toward the social context for human flourishing. We can only flourish, he says, in a civilized city (or state, or country). What is his argument? That is the subject of this chapter.
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September 6 - From the middle of X.8, Aristotle rejects the life of theōria for human beings. Given our compound nature, we flourish humanly by the fifth way of living: the life of moral goodness {aretē}, one that is enmeshed through and through with the activity of theōria, as befitting exclusively of human beings--gods and brutes excluded. (Cf. Adam Beresford's note 51.)
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August 16 - Having informed us finally in X.7 (1177a12–1178a8) what he means by the life of theōria and why it is the most flourishing sort of life that is possible for any being with the god-like power of nous, Aristotle argues in X.8 (1178a9–1179a32) that we human beings are compound in nature, requiring our distinguishing between the life of theōria as befitting exclusively of god(s) versus the activity of theōria as exercised by our choice-intention from the acquirable intellectual virtue and capacity {hexis} of intellect {nous}.
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August 9 - Back in NE book I chapter 5 (1095b14–1096a10), Aristotle names four ways of living that stand out as representative of how any human being might choose to live his own life for the sake of flourishing. Aristotle elaborates on three of these four ways of living in the chapter: the life of pleasure, the life of honor, and the life of money making. As for the fourth way, the life of theōria, Aristotle promises to get to it later (1096a4–5).
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It is now later. After having discussed all matters concerning the virtues, friendships, and pleasures, and after again summarizing in X.6 (1176a30–1177a11) the conditions of human flourishing, Aristotle at book X chapter 7 (1177a12–1178a8) will finally tell us what he means by the life of theōria.
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We are live-reading and discussing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, book X, which is about pleasure and human flourishing.
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The prerequisite to this book is our answering for ourselves these questions from the prior books, to which we will briefly review:
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1. What is the full-time job of being a human being?
2. What is the systematic structure of the human potential?
3. What is a virtue of character {ēthikē aretē}?
4. How does one come to acquire any of it? (E.g. pride, ambition, bravery, gentlemanliness, generosity, candor, fairness, friendliness, …)
5. How does one formulate right desires?
6. How is one to recover from being bad to becoming a good person?
7. What is entailed in and what is required of being a friend?
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The project's cloud drive is here, at which you'll find the reading texts, notes, and slideshows.

(* Robin Smith, author of SEP's 2022 entry "Aristotle's Logic," argues that Rhetoric should be part of the Organon.)

Whenever we do any human thing, we can either do it well or do it poorly. With instruments, we can do things either better, faster, and more; or worse, slower, and less. That is, with instruments they either augment or diminish our doings.

Do thinking and speaking (and writing and listening) require instruments? Yes. We do need physical instruments like microphones, megaphones, pens, papers, computers. But we also need mental instruments: grammar, vocabulary words, evidence-gathering techniques, big-picture integration methods, persuasion strategies. Thinking while sitting meditatively all day in a lotus position doesn't require much instrumentation of any kind, but thinking and speaking well in the sense of project planning, problem-solving, negotiating, arguing, deliberating--that is, the active doings in the world (whether romantic, social, commercial, or political)--do require well-honed mental instruments. That's the Organon in a nutshell.

Are you an up-and-coming human being, a doer, go-getter, achiever, or at least you're choosing to become one? You need to wield the Organon.

Join us.

(note this is an online event. An in person event is linked here .)The complicated relationship between philosophy and the arts begins with Plato, a literary genius who was suspicious of art as a potential siren song, but who nonetheless found an important role for beauty in his conception of the philosophical life. Last month we explored both Plato's celebration of beauty and his suspicion of poetry.
Now it turns out that there is a major philosopher whose work is in direct dialogue with that of Plato's, that nonetheless comes to the opposite conclusion about the arts. Where Plato despaired of Art's ability to communicate anything about ultimate reality, given its preoccupation with particulars and appearances, the strange and irascible Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the most influential of 19th century German philosophers, celebrated the arts and especially music as both providing us knowledge of universals, and as forms of disclosure of the ultimate nature of reality.
Born the son of a wealthy merchant, Schopenhauer’s iconoclastic and morose temperament never easily integrated with academic life, nor did his contempt for the ascendant star of Hegel, and like Kierkegaard, he was able to write by living relatively simply on the proceeds of an inheritance. Inspired both by Kant, and by works of Hiindu and buddhist philosophy, Schopenhauer developed a metaphysics In which Kant's conception of the world as we know it as being partially constructed by the structures of the human mind, was united with the suggestions found in Hindu philosophy that the world as we know it is a sort of mirage concealing the reality of a single kind of substance, the nature of which is clouded by our physical lusts and desires.
Schopenhauer identified this substance, which can only be intuited and not directly represented, with an irrational striving and forceful energy that he identified as the will. The tragedy of existence is that this striving is essentially doomed to dissatisfaction since all the objects that it can pursue are actually self-generated manifestations of itself and are likewise striving towards nothing in particular, are blind striving and effort itself. The result is that we are doomed to dissatisfaction and even to war with others, as long as we imagine that our desires can be satisfied. To recognize this, and to realize the futility of desire, is the highest ethical realization available for human beings.
One of the prime means of temporary liberation from the suffering of existence is to be found in art. For Schopenhauer argues that art, and it's disinterested contemplation of the structure of existence, liberates us from our individuality and our endless desires and allows us to experience a contemplative state where we experience reality and its structure , thus ultimately the will and its patterns of manifestation, without desire. It is this structure of reality that Schopenhauer associates with Platonic forms and making contemplative contact with such forms and their unfolding constitutes the essence of aesthetic contemplation
This peculiar kind of perception which allows us to be liberated from a futile world of violence, struggle and suffering, finds its culmination in music, which Schopenhauer claims to be the most perfect expression of the reality of the will, and therefore the symbolic means of communication of the deepest truths of existence.
And it is this peculiar emotionally charged vision of art as as a vehicle of metaphysical transcendence and truth, and this peculiarly bleak vision of a universe that is a manifestation of a desolate and futile kind of restless energy that would have a profound influence on future 19th century Culture, from the works of Nietzsche and Wagner, to Leo Tolstoy, to modern culture critics, the early Wittgenstein, and the early existentialists and nihilists. In this Meetup, we wish to explore this vision of aesthetics and its consequences, examining Schopenhauer's core exposition of it in his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation.
links to reading are here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HC4Rvg10IrNQ204ua1GJcxQFAUFN3Qub/view?usp=sharing