'Wise' is a bit of an epithet to live up to!
I've never really bought Schopenhauer's self IDing as a Platonist. I think he seperates what were the Platonic ideals into what is objectively in existence - and I think that is a 'downgrade' on what Plato meant- and the the loss of self, the will, as a means of approaching that reality. In synthesising Eastern thought with Plato, the imporatant thing is that loss of self. I would see Plato as thinking the will is essentially irrelevant.
Hi NS
Your reply clarified something and confused me in others. I just had a little google search to see what some bignobs had to say, and Bryan Magee no less, seems to think that the matter of the Platonic Forms were introduced completely ad hoc, and had nothing to do with the substance of S's philosophy. Another swot thinks they're a convenient half-way house between the world of phenomena and the ultimate reality of the Will (which I think is what you seem to be saying). Sure, they were a convenient way of introducing the idea of aesthetic contemplation as a means of escape from the inexorable promptings of the Will, but another wit has suggested that this is the equivalent of Baron Munchausen pulling himself and his horse out the river by his own pigtail.
There are definite aspects of mysticism to Plato which Inthink is seen in the idea of Platonic forms but I think that is dealt with by neo Platonists, and hence Schopenhauer by moving that mysticism onto the self rather than reality. This allows them to venerate aesthetics in a way that to me seems alien to Plato.
This veneration then causes a different tension since philosophy itself and the act of participating in it becomes a barrier. Dealing with this tension seems to be the major struggle of German 'romantic philosophy'.
Indeed, Schopenhauer's mysticism does focus on the loss of self in a variety of ways, one in the denial of the Will to live by saintly asceticism, or by the halfway house of artistic contemplation. But the barrier is not just the participating in philosophy - isn't it the act of deciding on the unreality of the self and then using the unreal self to decide to 'lose the self' as in any form of spiritual contemplation?
I'm conscious that in using the word synthesising, I'm conjuring a Hegelian dialectic - note I'm using the word 'conjuring' because I want to highlight that at this sort of level, I think philosophy has strong elements of a shadow religion. That dialectic is often used as a sort of Kant begat Schopenhauer who begat Nietzsche etc but I've never felt comfortable with that approach of logical progression. There are deep emotions involved.
I posted earlier today a link to an article on why the Scandinavian nations are judged 'happy'. I think thete is an element of that in Schopenhauer's quotidian approach to life which is an acceptance that to seek to reach the noumenal is doomed so don't get your hopes up, but that you shouldn't get your hopes up about being able to not get your hopes up.
(Hope this is useful, even though I feel like I've ignored the question.)
I think you've inferred from something I wrote that I bought into the Kant-Schopenhauer-Nietzsche progression. I still think there's a lot in it. Certainly, S is parasitic on Kant, in that Kant stated that there is an ultimate reality, but we can never really know it, because our senses only give a filtered version of it. Schopenhauer called that reality the Will, the meaningless driving force behind phenomena. But he also thought that we could get to know more about it at its points of greatest concentration - sex being the obvious example, and of course, as you say all sorts of deep emotions are involved in Schopenhauer's positing that particular aspect of his philosophy. Nietzsche's reaction to S' philosophy was of course also deeply emotional, and he wished to break free from its pessimism, but I don't think he succeeded that well. A lot of his thought depended on various 'peak experiences' which seemed to indicate a more vital form of life could be experienced, but he then contradicts all that with his idea of the Eternal Recurrence, so he got no further than Schopenhauer.
Your last paragraph brought a smile. I think Schopenhauer fully realised the contradictions between his own nature and his philosophy, and decided he might as well make the best of a bad job and enjoy as much as he could of the pleasures that life sometimes affords. There's a comparison with the Gnostics here: they all believed the material world was a dead loss, and some of them adopted the way of ascetic contemplation as a pathway to the Infinite, whereas others went the way of riotous self-indulgence, judging it didn't matter a damn either way. Perhaps Schopenhauer's lifestyle was a little closer to the latter camp?
