28 December 2008

From Schopenhauer

"The truth was not found, not because it was unsought, but because the intention always was to find again instead some preconceived opinion or other, or at least not to wound some favorite idea, and with this end in view subterfuges had to be employed against both other people and the thinker himself. It is the courage of making a clean breast of it in face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigible enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry in our hearts the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God's sake not to enquire further; and we give way to her, and that is the reason why philosophy stands where it does."

From a November 1815 letter to Goethe.

This is a fascinating conjunction of ideas, given the latter development of psychoanalysis. Schopenhauer starts off here describing what Freudians call "defense mechanisms," i.e. subterfuges employed by a thinker against the thinker himself. Then he illustrates such subterfuge by a reference to the myth of Oedipus.

The way in which that myth is invoked here is importantly different from the way in which Freud would use it. But I'll spare you the full compare-and-contrast essay. Go and enjoy the last day of the old year's last weekend.

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Knowledge is warranted belief -- it is the body of belief that we build up because, while living in this world, we've developed good reasons for believing it. What we know, then, is what works -- and it is, necessarily, what has worked for us, each of us individually, as a first approximation. For my other blog, on the struggles for control in the corporate suites, see www.proxypartisans.blogspot.com.