{"id":1778,"date":"2012-10-25T16:34:14","date_gmt":"2012-10-25T16:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxdebtadvisors.com\/blog\/?p=1778"},"modified":"2012-10-25T16:34:14","modified_gmt":"2012-10-25T16:34:14","slug":"schopenhauers-philosophy-and-arizona-irs-tax-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taxdebtadvisors.com\/blog\/schopenhauers-philosophy-and-arizona-irs-tax-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"Schopenhauer\u2019s Philosophy and Arizona IRS Tax Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Schopenhauer\u2019s philosophy is considered by many to be deeply pessimistic.\u00a0 But he obviously must have made some valid observations since Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Darwin, Proust, Kafka, O\u2019Neill, Tolstoy and Einstein credit him for having great influence on their work.\u00a0 This list includes leaders in philosophy, music, science, psychoanalysis, authors and playwrights.\u00a0 The breath of Schopenhauer\u2019s influence makes his life and work worthy of serious review.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Schopenhauer wrote that the will is a blind, rationally inaccessible force that is a primitive energy.\u00a0 This energy manifests itself in and through everything.\u00a0 The will gives us pleasure so that we will reproduce and pain so that we will avoid being eaten.\u00a0 It is impersonal, insatiable and dwells within us.\u00a0 It is a source of considerable suffering.\u00a0 After you satisfy the cravings and desires of the will, you have a brief respite, but then typically you become bored.\u00a0 As Schopenhauer put it, \u201cLife is nothing but a pendulum swinging between the pain of unfulfilled desires and boredom.\u00a0 Once we fulfill our desires then we are satiated and our strivings are quieted momentarily but we immediately sink into boredom or emptiness.\u201d\u00a0 Schopenhauer says that unsatisfied desires often have unfortunate and painful consequences.\u00a0 So the two options for human existence are pain and boredom.\u00a0 As long as one is alive, they are under siege by the will and the only way to eliminate that is to eliminate one\u2019s self.\u00a0 Schopenhauer felt that Buddhism offered a way to minimize the negative effects of the will.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Even though Schopenhauer was so pessimistic in his views of life, does not mean that he did not enjoy life.\u00a0 Nietzsche reminds us in his book, Beyond Good and Evil<\/em>, \u201cOne must remember that Schopenhauer played the flute every night after dinner.\u201d\u00a0 Nietzsche felt that Schopenhauer still found things in life that he enjoyed despite his pessimistic philosophy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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One must ask the question, \u201cWas Schopenhauer\u2019s view of life appropriate for everyone or just Schopenhauer?\u201d\u00a0 And secondly, was Schopenhauer more vulnerable to the strivings of the will than others?\u00a0 Was he such a pained, fearful, neurotic person that his personality influenced his philosophy or did he actually discover the truth about certain things that lead to his view of the world?\u00a0 I think it highly probably that we are all affected to one degree or another by this will, but that degree differs from person to person.\u00a0 And we are probably more prone to the effects of the will at certain stressful points during our lives than others.\u00a0 Schopenhauer would disagree with my points here.\u00a0 He felt that we are all affected by the will beyond our ability to deal with it and find meaning in life.\u00a0 All we can do is try to minimize its effect on us. <\/strong><\/p>\n

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The world is not just will to Schopenhauer, it is also idea.\u00a0 The world is what we think it is and that is always an illusion or a perception.\u00a0 The world is what our mind tells us it is.\u00a0 There is no reality, only illusion and even though an illusion is shared by many, it is still not reality.\u00a0 Life is just a spark in between two pools of darkness without any meaning or purpose.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Schopenhauer felt himself in competition with Hegel.\u00a0 In one of his writings he stated, \u201cI wish to apologize to the reader of the future for mentioning Hegel, a philosopher you have never heard of.\u201d\u00a0 Hegel celebrated the human spirit and taught his students how to enjoy that spirit.\u00a0 He believed that the human spirit controlled the destiny of history.\u00a0 In another classroom across the hall was Schopenhauer saying, \u201cThere is a force that wells up in you.\u00a0 It is always there.\u00a0 It gnaws at you.\u00a0 It is always victimizing you because it wants more and more.\u00a0 If you get what you want, you get bored.\u00a0 If you get what you want it might even be painful.\u00a0 Usually you don\u2019t get what you want.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

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Schopenhauer contradicted Hegel by saying that history doesn\u2019t have a rational direction.\u00a0 History is just things happening and they happen because of this will that we experience through us, that is at work all the time trying to express and satisfy itself.\u00a0 He would say things like \u201cwe have these fancy philosophical types who are telling us we can celebrate the human spirit.\u00a0 They are telling us that we can learn to conquer our desires through reason.\u00a0 They tell us that we can be creative and remove ourselves from the will that is pulsating through us.\u00a0 That is all fine and good, but just let yourself experience your life and think about how you want food, sex, and excitement.\u00a0 Sometimes you get what you want and most of the time you don\u2019t.\u00a0 Most of your desires are not met at all.\u00a0 So you suffer.\u00a0 You are always in a state of tension because of suffering, because of desire, because of the will.\u00a0 You are not even conscious of the will.\u00a0 It is buried below your conscious mind.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

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As you can see Schopenhauer philosophy is very unpleasant and pessimistic.\u00a0 His ideas did not make people feel comfortable.\u00a0 Some have referred to it as \u201cmetaphysics from hell.\u201d\u00a0 Life is a state of being where your desires are not satisfied and your questions are never answered. And you are stuck.\u00a0 There are no options except suicide and if you give in to suicide then you gave in to the will.\u00a0 This is pretty pessimistic stuff. <\/strong><\/p>\n

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Nietzsche and Schopenhauer started at the same point with the same data and came to different conclusions.\u00a0 Both looked at life very accurately, both had no supernatural belief.\u00a0 Both looked directly at the reality of death, and both looked at nothingness.\u00a0 Nietzsche affirmed and embraced life and Schopenhauer chose to negate it.\u00a0 Hume and Schopenhauer had the same basic beliefs and reacted much differently.\u00a0 Hume was a very pleasant English gentleman and on his deathbed was asked how being an atheist he could be so calm facing death.\u00a0 Hume replied that there was nothing before he was born and he didn\u2019t want to be bored with an association of those who thought they were going to heaven.\u00a0 There was absolutely no hint of pessimism or regret.\u00a0 So it seems that personality and life experiences must have an impact on the philosopher\u2019s philosophy.\u00a0 It has been said that one must first understand the life of the philosopher before trying to understand their philosophy and that one follows the other.\u00a0 But Schopenhauer did not just take us to the edge of the abyss and leave us there to fend for ourselves.\u00a0 He offered remedies to the human condition as he saw it.\u00a0 His remedies are valuable insights into living life whether you believe in effects of the will.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Schopenhauer offers four methods of escape from this pulsing energy he called \u201cthe will.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The first solution is what he called aesthetic contemplation.\u00a0 For example we can get our minds off of things by seeing a movie or watching a sporting event.\u00a0 During Schopenhauer\u2019s time you might go look at a painting or other types of art to get your mind off the underlying agony that is the constant companion of all humans.\u00a0 He admits that this type of relief is only fleeting and cannot sustain permanent relief.\u00a0 This notion of getting disengaged from life by getting one\u2019s mind off of its misery can be helpful for a while.\u00a0 This may explain why the entertainment industry is so popular today. <\/strong><\/p>\n

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The second suggestion Schopenhauer makes is the cultivation of sympathy for one\u2019s fellow beings.\u00a0 That too is only temporary.\u00a0 It was Schopenhauer\u2019s view that we should recognize that everyone is struggling with the will.\u00a0 All of us are suffering from its manifestations.\u00a0 We all suffer the same agonies, and the realization that we are all in this together makes coping with it easier.\u00a0 Having true sympathy or compassion, and understanding that everyone is struggling with the same thing, partially removes the ravages of the will.\u00a0 It is not a cure, but at least something that can temporarily help us along and perhaps engender a noncompetitive acceptance of the condition we all face as human beings.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The third suggestion is music.\u00a0 He believed that music has a special capacity to capture the will and lessen its negative impact on us.\u00a0 Schopenhauer believed that music has a calming effect.\u00a0 Music for Schopenhauer is not meant to make us understand anything.\u00a0 It is to get us away from thinking about anything.\u00a0 The music he listened to was usually without words or lyrics.\u00a0 Mozart not Rap.\u00a0 He thinks that music speaks in a language that can and does put us more at peace with ourselves. <\/strong><\/p>\n

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The fourth suggestion is the most challenging.\u00a0 Hold your breath\u2014the best we might do is lose the will to live.\u00a0 Schopenhauer thinks perhaps the best of all the remedies for the disease called life and its agonies would be to reach a condition of calm and tranquil passivity where our individual wills do not torment us anymore.\u00a0 We don\u2019t allow anything to matter to us, even our very selves.\u00a0 It is his view that the loss of the will to live is not the same as the desire to commit suicide.\u00a0 He is suggesting that we reach a benign and mellow point where things don\u2019t matter anymore, even you. <\/strong><\/p>\n

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In summary the human predicament is that we are victims of life.\u00a0 Life itself is the disease and we need a cure from that disease and all the knowledge in the world will not bring about a cure. Schopenhauer brings a very strongly negative and pessimistic element into European philosophical thinking.\u00a0 He believes that the best we can accomplish is to find whatever peace of mind we can.\u00a0 This requires a disengagement from the painful cycle of desire and satisfaction of desires.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Schopenhauer proposed a thought experiment in which you go to a cemetery and knock on any tombstone and ask the person there if they want to be alive again and his conclusion was that none of the dead would want to be alive again.\u00a0 Nietzsche would contradict Schopenhauer on this point by saying, if you lived well, if you lived life to its fullest, you would be willing to live it again an innumerable number of times.\u00a0 This was Nietzsche\u2019s law of eternal recurrence.\u00a0 That one must embrace and affirm life to the point that we would want to live it all over again an infinite number of times exactly the same way.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Schopenhauer was very taken with Buddhist beliefs.\u00a0 He was the major influential figure who brought Buddhist thinking to the West in a way that made it spread.\u00a0 The message of Buddhism is that life is suffering and to be alive is to suffer.\u00a0 Buddha said, \u201cAll is suffering.\u201d\u00a0 Suffering is brought about by desire and desire does have a cure and the cure is to lose our attachment to our desires.\u00a0 It is this disengagement that Schopenhauer recommends. <\/strong><\/p>\n

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Schopenhauer\u2019s remedies are: aesthetic contemplation, cultivating sympathy for our fellow beings, good music, and disengagement from our attachments and desires are similar to many admonitions from the scriptures.\u00a0 The scriptures teach us that we should be willing to bear one another\u2019s burdens, mourn with those who mourn, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort and to deny ourselves of all ungodliness.\u00a0 Despite his pessimism, there is much to benefit from understanding the following quotes of Schopenhauer.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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So how does Schopenhauer\u2019s philosophy relate to having an IRS problem?\u00a0 The IRS is like \u201cthe will.\u201d\u00a0 It is unrelenting in its pursuit of you and your assets if you have an Arizona IRS debt.\u00a0 And Schopenhauer\u2019s remedies will resonate with you during your first free consultation with Scott Allen E.A.\u00a0 You will be able to enjoy life more just knowing that you have a plan to resolve your tax debt.\u00a0 You will sense Scott\u2019s sympathy for your situation with the IRS.\u00a0 You are not a number to Scott; you are a person with feelings and fears about what the IRS can do to you.\u00a0\u00a0 You may not agrees with Scott\u2019s choice of music, but his actions and results will be music to you.\u00a0 And finally, you will lose your neurotic attachment to your property once you know that Scott Allen E.A. of Mesa AZ will be able to protect them from IRS seizure and levy action.\u00a0 Call Scott Allen E.A. at 480-926-9300 and put your mind at ease.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Print off this blog and bring it with you at the initial consultation and receive 10% off any IRS resolution work we do. \u00a0One blog offer per client.<\/strong><\/p>\n

– Scott Allen<\/a> – info@taxdebtadvisors.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Schopenhauer\u2019s philosophy is considered by many to be deeply pessimistic.\u00a0 But he obviously must have made some valid observations since Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Darwin, Proust, Kafka, O\u2019Neill, Tolstoy and Einstein credit him for having great influence on their work.\u00a0 This list includes leaders in philosophy, music, science, psychoanalysis, authors and playwrights.\u00a0 The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[86],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taxdebtadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taxdebtadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taxdebtadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taxdebtadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taxdebtadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/taxdebtadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taxdebtadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taxdebtadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taxdebtadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}