Combining Texts

Ideas for 'General Facts,Phys Necessity, and Metaph of Time', 'Intro to 'Essays on Actions and Events'' and 'The World as Will and Idea'

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3 ideas

20. Action / B. Preliminaries of Action / 2. Willed Action / a. Will to Act
7187 Schopenhauer was caught in Christian ideals, because he didn't deify his 'will' [Nietzsche on Schopenhauer]
     Full Idea: Schopenhauer's interpretation of the in-itself as will was an essential step: but he didn't know how to deify the will, and remained caught in the moral, Christian ideal
     From: comment on Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea [1819]) by Friedrich Nietzsche - Writings from Late Notebooks 9[42]
     A reaction: Intriguingly, this seems to suggest that Nietzsche consciously sought to replace the absence of God with the human will, which strikes me as an odd, and very nineteenth century, idea. Loss of religion bothered them a lot.
21365 Only the will is thing-in-itself, seen both in blind nature and in human action [Schopenhauer]
     Full Idea: Only the will is thing-in-itself. ...It appears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of man, and the great difference between the two concerns only the degree of the manifestation.
     From: Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea [1819], I 110), quoted by Christopher Janaway - Schopenhauer 3 'Will'
     A reaction: If will acts 'blindly' in forces of nature, then these seems to be the same concept as Nietzsche's 'will to power'. This seems to be heading towards Heidegger's Dasein, as a central and distinctive mode of being.
20. Action / B. Preliminaries of Action / 2. Willed Action / d. Weakness of will
6385 The causally strongest reason may not be the reason the actor judges to be best [Davidson]
     Full Idea: I defend my causal view of action by arguing that a reason that is causally strongest need not be a reason deemed by the actor to provide the strongest (best) grounds for acting.
     From: Donald Davidson (Intro to 'Essays on Actions and Events' [1980], p.xii)
     A reaction: If I smoke a cigarette against my better judgement, it is not clear to me how the desire to smoke it, which overcomes my judgement not to smoke it, counts as the causally strongest 'reason'. We seem to have two different senses of 'reason' here.