ISIS

Lydia Wilson has an article in The Nation whose thesis is that the people who are joining ISIS (and I don't think we are talking about white Western recruits here) are not really that committed or even knowledgeable about ISIS tenets and the jihadist cause. I get the idea that the main motivation for young recruits is to fight off an American invasion of Islam, with the invasion of Iraq and the takedown of Saddam Hussein serving as the Big Bang that kicked off this macabre world of chaos and destruction. I want to keep an excerpt on a discussion between an ISIS fighter and his leader, which was overheard by a Kurdish general over a confiscated walkie-talkie.

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“My brother is with me, but he is dead, and we are surrounded, we need help at least to take away my brother’s body.”

“What else could you want? Your brother is in heaven and you are about to be.”

This answer wasn’t what the poor surrounded young man was hoping for. “Please come and rescue me,” he said. “That heaven, I don’t want it.” But they didn’t, leaving him to whatever paradise awaited.

-- The Nation.com

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Schopenhauer

“If anyone who wanders all day arrives towards evening, it is enough.”

-- Petrarch

“Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up.”

-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Schopenhauer cites the first quote in relation to the hard fact that his philosophy did not start to get recognized until very late in his life when he was an old man. Though, I like the quote, also, on a more general reading, that is, even if one achieves no more than to see the evening, or old age, then that is enough - even if you never even created a philosophy, nor even a single decent poem, to be recognized.

Schopenhauer cites the Rousseau quote in opening his magnum opus “The World as Will and Representation”. For him, it was Kant that rang the wake-up call, while he clarifies and perfects this philosophy of transcendental idealism: that your world and knowledge thereof comes from within you. You can never know the world and all of the things in it in themselves.

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“The world is my representation”: this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing thing, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him. It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Representation” (tr. E. F. J. Payne)

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