Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist.
Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot.
So who composed that plot?
Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you.
And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others.
The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else.
And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
THE WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA
I sat next to Schopenhauer, the German metaphysician
on the top deck of the bus going from Stockport
via Hyde to Ashton on a Thursday afternoon
when it was raining and offered him a cigarette.
In those days you could still smoke on the top deck.
Arthur believed that we were only phenomenally
distinct from each other and the reality was sympathy.
We lived, not in alienation, but connected.
When the ticket inspector asked to see his ticket
Schopenhauer berated him, as he berated Hegel.
Hegel, Schelling and Fichte. He berated almost
everyone (although he liked Goethe, I think)
We were approaching Woodley if I remember correctly.
The ticket inspector was only doing his job
but when he looked to me for support
I sided more with Arthur. I wish I could explain it.
The will is blind. Blind and striving. Irrational.
Like a continuation of thought from your Krishnamurti post from yesterday! I must have some subconscious knowledge of this because of the obsessions I've had for the past week in connecting the dots. It's like the universe suddenly gave me the space to create a mosaic whose plan had not before been baked. It reminds me of Victor Hugo's statement that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. When that happens, it feels like all the forces in one's life converge to complete that mosaic. So thank you.