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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Charles Koch: it’s Schopenhauer’s fault that people engage in “character assassination” of the Koch brothers

Brian Leiter

This is quite bizarre.  As Tad Brennan (Cornell) wrote to me, "Does anyone have any idea what he is talking about?  What bit of Schopenhauer could he possibly have in mind?  And did Schopenhauer actually advocate it, as well as describing it?"  My guess is that since his piece is full of Rand-speak, Ayn Rand probably makes this charge against Schopenhauer, but that's just a guess.  Readers, any ideas?  (Schopenhauer certainly was good at polemics, though many of them were directed at Hegel, a "collectivist" on Planet Koch.)

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5 responses to “Charles Koch: it’s Schopenhauer’s fault that people engage in “character assassination” of the Koch brothers”

  1. Stephen Puryear

    Schopenhauer does describe the general strategy of discrediting and intimidating one's opponents in Eristic Dialectics: The Art Of Being Right. That's probably what he has in mind.

    Reply
  2. kurt

    Either he is more erudite than I suspect, or Mr. Koch is relying, as suggested, on somebody else's (e.g. Rand's) reference to Schopenhauer. My guess is that the piece in question is Schopenhauer's "The Art of Controversy." I daresay his understanding of Schopenhauer is about as accurate as is his understanding of Alinsky, and quite possibly for the same reason (i.e. not actually having read the text in question).

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  3. Mark Alfano

    Very charitable. My guess is that he has some magical notion of willpower in mind after watching "Life is Beautiful."

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  4. David Sullivan

    Schopenhauer — and other "nay sayers" — lack "the power of positive thinking"! Yes, "Life is beautiful!" … despite the overwhelming empirical evidence (strike that) that life contains more suffering than happiness.

    Don't promote the "malevolent universe premise":

    http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/malevolent_universe_premise.html

    Entrpreneurial success awaits!

    Reply
  5. David

    'the overwhelming empirical evidence … that life contains more suffering than happiness.'

    What evidence are you talking about here? I thought that psychology studies which asked people to record their mood at various times over a certain period tended to find people experienced on average somewhat more positive than negative affect, though I can't recall any citations off the top of my head.

    I'd also be surprised, a priori if this was a matter on which the evidence could be 'overwhelming', in either direction, given the very large degree of vagueness involved in terms like 'happiness' and 'suffering' and the difficulty of comparing different instances of them in intensity as supposed to merely duration, but perhaps I'm wrong about this.

    BL COMMENT: Schopenhauer certainly took the evidence to be overwhelming, partly because of how he conceived of desire and its satisfaction. I imagine he would not have been impressed by the self-report studies by the 'happiness' industry.

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