Schopenhauer's Weather Forecast

Existence, for all life, is subject to the whims of the weather. Billowing clouds roll across clear skies to induce darkness and a reduced temperature, this invokes conservative strategies of living and propagation. The rains which spring forth bring nectar unto the earth which allow gullys to turn into streams and canyons to rivers. Transfiguring incentives into gills, fins and flexible serpentine backbones. Just as weather brings movement and stasis, weather brings life and death. The weather, the background calculus incentivizing all life, appears to be the primal cause. The clouds begin to swell darker. A great flash and crash falls from the high station of the heavens: “Consciousness […] a lightning-flash momentarily illuminating the night”.¹ Briefly, but powerfully, the lightning of cognition and awareness cuts through the natural power of the weather with an awesome release of purposeful energy. An energy, just as grasping as the primal will of life yet with intention and intellect. Corporeal electricity ignites the shrubbery of the ground into Promethean Fire, smashes open to earth to reveal the bounty contained within and releases precious energy for its own enjoyment. As the clouds clear and the short-lived power of thunder has dissipated, once again we return to the prime source of energetic power, “the sun […] source of heat, the first condition of all life”.² Under the plentiful rays of the sun incentives are once again inverted. Adequate sustenance springs forth from the earth, ripe for the foraging of grasping hands and chewing mouths. Selection pressure abated, restraint dissipates and life conducts an orgy of propagation.

Is the driving force of human existence the lower incentives of material energy, which drive us towards growth and propagation through the will? Or, is the occasional lightning of conscious thought and reflection the higher-stationed prime-mover of the human animal?