21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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— the will to being. Schopenhauer’s ideas spawned a whole lot of post-modern thought, including Nietzsche’s will to power and Freud’s will to pleasure.

Given what was said above about the noumenon perhaps originally not being intended to be ‘mysterious’ and also the possibility that what constitutes the noumenon may be eroded by new knowledge, I want to distinguish it in this work from what I will refer to as mystery. The noumenon may simply be what cannot be directly measured. But there is mystery beyond this — in fact an infinite regress of mystery such that we may never reach total understanding. For consistency with writers quoted later in this work, we could say that the essence of an individual emanates from mystery. To an extent this is similar to Schopenhauer’s view that the Will emanates from the noumenon, but perhaps not what Kant had in mind with the original split.

Mystery is also the source of value. Robert Pirsig, in his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, would have ultimate reality as ‘dynamic quality’ and then split up the phenomenal world in terms of static ‘quality’. Value is therefore built into the universe by definition — in fact value defines the universe. Pirsig’s account is very useful in illuminating just what we do and what we assume when we split the world into subject and object rather than aspects of value. Pirsig draws attention to the essential place of desire in all of life and shows how choosing and preferring are actually more fundamental to the way life is lived than rationality and intellect. The idea of an inert,

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