Schopenhauer In-Depth: The Total Denial of the World by the Greatest Pessimist of Philosophy

arthur schopenhauer is basically known for two things first uh he's quite possibly the most important influence on friedrich nietzsche which is why we're talking about him on the nietzsche podcast but secondly he's known for being the quintessential pessimist schopenhauer argues that life and existence are futile that there is no good served in all of the strivings of the human will and that the best thing for us is to negate the will the negation of all desires and goals and yes even the rejection of the world because this is a world of untold and unimaginable suffering

an inevitable fact of our existence in it so those two things that everyone seems to know about schopenhauer nevertheless may present something of a puzzle because nietzsche couldn't be more opposed to such an outlook on life such a picture of the world and yet schopenhauer had arguably more influence in shaping the early philosophy of nietzsche than any other thinker why would it be the case that a schopenhauer who rejects life and rejects the world could give rise to a nietzsche the man who says that we must love our fate say yes to life and indeed

wish for our lives to return to us endlessly unchanged in any form or fashion to answer this question and to untangle this puzzle how the no saying schopenhauer influenced the yes saying nietzsche we're going to do a sort of introductory course to shopenhauer's philosophy and then we'll bring in nietzsche's writings on schopenhauer and nietzsche as he relates to schopenhauer in the episodes to follow this first episode of two will concern schopenhauer's twin explanations of the world which are interrelated and schopenhauer would argue depend upon one another require and assert one another there is the way

of viewing the world as will and the way of viewing the world as representation in one sense the world is an undivided unchanging force which schopenhauer calls will which is the true nature of all phenomena that arise they're all just objectifications of the will which is in itself just blind impulse but on the other hand the will takes on these different manifestations or objectifications that are recognizable and distinct from one another which arise and pass away and are thus temporary in short the world of representation um in this world things are subject to causality to

temporality to the laws of space and laws of physics and the laws that govern matter and thus all things are born grow and die this is the world of representation because this world as far as we perceive it only exists as a representation in the minds of men and there's no way to talk about it outside of that context so this episode is about the theory behind schopenhauer's philosophical approach we're talking about why it is that schopenhauer argues that there are these two ways of viewing the world and what they entail and how he grounds

his arguments that follow in the latter half of the book which is about his practical philosophy and so the episode after this one we'll talk about his practical philosophy which means his ethics and his aesthetic ideas um so the episode today will cover books one and two of world as will and representation which is schopenhauer's really his only book um you know he wrote a lot of essays and fragments and aphorisms and elaborations on that book but his whole work is centered around that single book um and so we're covering books one and two of

that which is what it concerns what schopenhauer would call his the objective picture of the world his epistemology and his ontology the next episode will be schopenhauer's normative ideas for living in that world and we'll cover books three and four but first uh we'll talk a little bit about schopenhauer's life many other german philosophers who came from families of either academics or clergy schopenhauer came from a family of the merchant class his father was a respected businessman who settled the family in danzig the city was later taken over by the prussians and schopenhauer's father moved

the family to hamburg the family lived there for 12 years but schopenhauer's father eventually began to show signs of mental unbalance and died by falling into a canal one night in an incident that most regarded as likely being a suicide this left the young arthur schopenhauer with only his mother and his sister and schopenhauer's relationship with his mother johanna has been much commented on but suffice to say they did not seem to like one another there are correspondents in some of their interactions that have survived gives an image of a very hostile and sometimes nasty

relationship to say the least so for example um schopenhauer's mother wrote novels which were moderately popular at the time and he allegedly told her that one day his writing would still be available when her books had been long forgotten and his mother responded something to the effect of um if i remember correctly she said you know yes i'm sure the one book he wrote will be available you know you know but will anyone still care you know um after his father died um young arthur at 17 years old kept a promise he'd made to go

into the business world um and so the family home was sold his mother and sister left arthur for weimar arthur as the inheritor of the schopenhauer name was consigned to working at a an office as a clerk and the office was run by a merchant named jinish or yinish i guess this was an arrangement that schopenhauer's father set up for him before his father died in untimely death and now sort of in the wake of his father's death arthur schopenhauer had little choice but to continue on that course um until he was 21 years of

age which was the point where he would inherit his share of the family fortune or at least whatever was left of it that his mother hadn't spent his mother was living off this inheritance as an independently wealthy person um you know and doing all of her creative pursuits in the meanwhile um and so the prospect of these four long years as a clerk were like torture to arthur schopenhauer who he had studied in paris he had dreams of a literary career and so two years into his time working for yinish he received a letter for

uh from his mother saying that if he wanted to he could regard his promise to his late father fulfilled and could change his way of living if he so desired upon reading this letter schopenhauer burst into tears and immediately walked out of the office schopenhauer then went into higher education he studied at gotha in grammar school and then at weimar and then he enters gottingen university where he studies medicine and science he was around 22 at the time um a teacher of his named ge schulze told him that he should limit his reading of philosophy

to plato and kant schopenhauer took this advice more or less literally and as we will discuss you can see the effect that this had on schopenhauer's philosophy at a very early age his philosophical ideas became relatively fixed such that his philosophy did not develop at all beyond the initial ideas set forth in his book world as will and representation you know for the latter two-thirds of his life his whole 72 years on earth he more or less held to the same ideas he wrote that book at 28 years old and for the rest of his

years on the planet everything he wrote was just an elaboration on the same set of ideas and so as such we cannot really say that he was influenced all that much by contemporary philosophers including some famous philosophers that he saw lecture in person such as ficta because he'd already made up his mind on the core ideas meanwhile he saw himself as the only legitimate interpreter and inheritor of the philosophy of kant and overall despised all others who claimed to be continuing kantianism this included hegel whom schopenhauer especially hated so he publishes his book world as

will and representation in 1918 and two years later he went to go lecture at university he opened a course in berlin for the summer semester and he chose a lecture time at the same day and same time that hegel lectured hegel at the time was a philosophical rock star and he was very popular as a lecturer to loads of people coming to his lectures schopenhauer was basically unknown at the time and lectured mostly to empty rooms so he tried for years uh or for months rather sorry not years he tried for months in vain to

compete with hegel but he eventually gave up and he stopped teaching the course um schopenhauer's uh philosophical uh grounding in western philosophy seemed to be fixed within the world of plato and kant without any possibility of being influenced by his contemporaries but there was a third element which came from outside the western philosophical tradition for the first time translations of some of the ideas of indian philosophy including hindu and buddhist philosophy were coming into the western world through translations that had never before been widely available schopenhauer read some of these imports and this became the

third pillar of his philosophical structure specifically the text that contributed the most to the views put forward in world of war as will and representation was the upanishads of which he had a latin translation of a persian translation of the sanskrit original and this translation first appeared in 1801 by combining plato and kant and then adding the influence of the upanishads schopenhauer forged a new philosophical identity and he was certain he would eventually come into fame and repute however as with his lectures failing to find an audience at berlin schopenhauer also failed to find a

readership for his book and it was mostly unknown and obscure up until the 1850s when schopenhauer had become an old man and in that decade he did gain some disciples in his later years and um because he got that taste fame became like a manic obsession for him um nevertheless during his lifetime the philosophical direction set by hegel remained the dominant direction uh within german philosophy and schopenhauer remained pretty obscure um what else well there there's a couple of fun stories about schopenhauer uh using fun in a darkly humorous way because everything's gonna be a

little bit dark today um you know he pushed a woman down the stairs during an argument or they fought and she fell down the stairs however it happened but schopenhauer then fought against her litigation against him she sued him for damages that he owed her by causing her a lifelong injury and he fought five years of legal battles not have to pay this woman anything and eventually the court ruled that he did have to provide her with sixty dollars a year which is in today's money nearest as i can figure it about 85 us dollars

i got that figure because haulingdale he he gives that amount as about um i think he says nine pounds or 15 pounds i can't remember how much it was some small amount of pounds in 1970 england which is when the the work that i was reading off of was published was in 1970 england said a little conversion to modern day us dollars adjusting for exchange rate and inflation got about 85 us dollars so maybe that's accurate maybe it's not if it's not let me know um in any case not a lot of money whatever amount

we're talking about not a lot of money that schopenhauer had to pay this woman but he just hated that he had to pay her anything and when the woman finally died in 1852 schopenhauer received her death certificate and he wrote on it um obit honest abit onas which is latin for the old woman dies the debt departs um another fun story schopenhauer when there was uh some civil unrest and rioting and socialist uprisings going on at one point he went and he volunteered his apartment for the soldiers to use to get a better shot at

the rioters um you know he didn't just consent to soldiers using his balcony he like went down and opened the door and let him in and said come on you can get a good shot at him from up here um these stories are often brought up because i it's you know they're outlandish they also show a dark side to schopenhauer but there's underneath a lot of the stories of schopenhauer's life what we learn is a sort of stubbornness of character obstinance unwillingness to bend toward you know for any reason or to anybody and so rj

hollingdale in his introduction to schopenhauer's essays he writes about schopenhauer's daily habits specifically about his daily habit habits during the twilight years of schopenhauer's life and so just as we talked about nietzsche's daily habits in the second episode i think it's always illuminating to read about the day-to-day life of these figures because it tells you so much about them so hollingdale writes quote from the age of 45 until his death 27 years later schopenhauer lived in frankfurt almaine he lived alone in rooms and every day of 27 years he followed an identical routine he rose

every morning at seven and had a bath but no breakfast he drank a cup of strong coffee before sitting down at his desk and riding until noon at noon he ceased work for the day and spent half an hour practicing the flute on which he became quite a skilled performer then he went out for lunch at the englisherhof after lunch he returned home and read until four when he left for his daily walk he walked for two hours no matter what the weather at six o'clock he visited the reading room of the library and read

the times in the evening he attended the theater or a concert after which he had dinner at a hotel or restaurant he got back home between nine and ten and went early to bed he was willing to deviate from this routine in order to receive visitors but with this exception he carried on through for 27 years end quote hollingdale's conclusion from this is that this immovability is the central facet of schopenhauer's personality you know he didn't walk every day because he was a health nut we see no other evidence of health fanaticism in chopin hours

behavior it's simply that he demanded that he keep to his routine every single day come whatev whatever weather and nothing would stop him and what's interesting is that we also hear this about nietzsche and his daily walk and also the people of konigsberg used to set their clocks by the regularity of when kant went on his walk among all these german philosophers we find this exceptional regularity with their daily habits um and always a quintessential walk so it's strange to me in a way um oh i mean in some sense it makes perfect sense but

these figures don't just share ideas they share habits and certain patterns in their lives so in any case nietzsche first discovered schopenhauer from a friend named paul duson who recommended that he read world as will in representation while the two were fellow students at schulpe forta which is a renowned german boarding school that nietzsche went to before he would go on to college what we would call college in the us doosan went on to become a noted orientalist thinker and an explicator of eastern philosophical concepts and a respected writer in his own right but it

he's really important to us in our story because he's the one who showed nietzsche schopenhauer nietzsche in the words of charlie heuneman was quote lit a fire by schopenhauer he'd become you know very familiar with plato and greek philosophy generally um and nietzsche like schopenhauer was very influenced in his thinking by continuism especially the neocontinence that we've uh discussed such as albert uh frederick albert longa harmon von helmholtz you can mor learn more about that that neo-kantian influence on nietzsche in episodes five and eight of this podcast the ones on heraclitus and on truth respectively

but nietzsche took that initial spark set by schopenhauer and he went in a radically different direction than doosan rather than leading nietzsche to the embrace of eastern philosophical concepts the fact that schopenhauer had so successfully blended and drawn parallels between the ideas of kant and the ideas of the hindus and the buddhists indicated something to nietzsche about the parallels between christian values and the values of the buddhists furthermore schopenhauer had dared to take the fundamental metaphysical ideas of the west and of our religious background you know which kant had translated into philosophical terms schopenhauer had

taken these um fundamental ideas and followed them through to their final and necessary conclusion in an honest and fearless way and schopenhauer ultimately produces a philosophy which rejects the world and rejects all life he had done this in in his own eyes by fulfilling the kanti and metaphysics by fulfilling the kantian morality all of which arguably began with plato and his ideas of the cave of the true world remaining unattainable to the senses of reason providing the power to see through the veils of illusion so in short schopenhauer provided the insight nietzsche required in order

to see through all the flaws as he saw them inherent in the western philosophical tradition and within the strands of thought begun with the likes of plato and later continued with kant if schopenhauer is in fact thinking through the ideas of kant and plato to their logical conclusions then schopenhauer's honesty in this respect led him to this place of pessimism nietzsche wished to fully embrace that honesty and to dare to ask those hard and terrifying questions about reality that schopenhauer raised such as is life worth living or you know suppose that to not exist would

be better than to come into being in this world of suffering um where nietzsche then departs from schopenhauer is in it's in several ways but one of the big ways is in his metaphysical shift which we discussed in the very first episode in nietzsche placing all the value into this world of phenomena and embracing the world of phenomena on that basis he accepts this is a world of striving and suffering but then seeks to affirm that world and we'll get into all of this much more in the later episodes when we talk about how nietzsche

dealt with schopenhauer and how he moved beyond schopenhauer but i hope i've given you at least a somewhat comprehensible account of schopenhauer's overall life and significance on the and what his significance to nietzsche more than anything and so that with all that being said let's go to the text now schopenhauer's great work the world as will and representation and i'm using the efj pain translation where i'd like to begin talking about schopenhauer's actual philosophy is with the world as will which actually is the topic of the second book schopenhauer he actually begins by talking about

the world as representation first but i'm going to reverse the order because i think i think his thinking and his method when talking about the world as well is a bit easier to to get or to make it click upon hearing a lot of this for the first time so book two begins with schopenhauer illustrating why it is that the world exists in these two aspects of will and representation and his means of doing this is by turning our attention to the subjective experience specifically he centers our focus on our own consciousness our own awareness

and on our own bodies this observation i believe is the most profound among the first two books it's the observation that the world as we know it exists in two aspects because one subjective experience exists in two aspects as well schopenhauer draws our attention to our own subjective experience and particularly he says that the subjective experience that we human beings have of our own body is in these two aspects on the one hand we're aware of our bodies as they exist in the form of objects this is the body as a representation schopenhauer operates within

that framework laid down by kant that all things we perceive come to us through the sense organs and thus we do not experience reality as it actually is but merely reality as the sense organs represent it to us one's body is clearly an object within the world of objects and it's affected by other objects it's subject to the laws of physics that all the other phenomena have to obey that means the body is subject to impermanence to causality to impenetrability by other objects made of matter not that the matter that makes you up can't be

pierced or penetrated but that you know when you place your hand on the table it doesn't pass through the table like other solid objects you don't merely pass through things you're not coterminous with other objects with mass you exist as a body that moves through time and space and occupies time and space like other objects and this body is part of the world of matter obeying the laws that govern matter and you as the knowing subject perceive your body as a thing in that respect and yet you also have a different experience with the body

or a different aspect of your own experience this subjective experience is unique to contemplating the body and that it is the experience of having control over the body that you don't you don't have that experience with any other phenomena you contemplate um and more than that schopenhauer argues that what it is that you are is coterminous with the body and so far as what you are is will so what he means by will is approximate to the subjective experience you have in acting as a subject in the world what your will uh wills you might

say so the body does the body enacts your will in the world and thus the body is the objectification of your will in the world and so what you are in one sense is that representation but this explanation on its own is a little more than a tautology right because we can't say that your your sense organs themselves are simply a creation of your sense organs that um you know whatever the subject is that senses the thing that senses um is not itself a product of the senses whatever it is that represents is not itself

reducible to a representation what are you in and of yourself that is not simply a representation and again the answer is will for schopenhauer i think the argument here is very strong and that schopenhauer's evidence for this it's the subjective experience that everyone has that we experience ourselves within the world as a thing moving towards a series of goals and desires and these goals and desires are not autonomously selected but an inextricable part of who you are and what is in your own nature such that you hunger and so your will becomes aimed at finding

food and eating and the body follows suit or you have a sexual desire and your will becomes aimed at fulfilling that impulse or you have desire for status or material advantage whatever it might be when you desire to act on this well the body is the thing that acts and it does so in a way that schopenhauer argues i agree with him or not on this he says it's not even a causal link the will is so fundamental that it exists independently of causality because causality is simply a law of how phenomena behave and the

will in itself is not a phenomenon because phenomena are things within this world of representation whatever is governed by causality is an object within that world of representation so we cannot apply causality to the will and schopenhauer's few it instead the will is this groundless ground of all phenomena and so he writes in section 17 of book two um quote we ask whether this world is nothing more than representation in that case it would inevitably pass us by like an empty dream or a ghostly vision not worth our consideration or we ask whether it is

something else something in addition and if so what that something is this much is certain namely that this something about which we are inquiring must be by its whole nature completely and fundamentally different from the representation and so the forms and laws of the representation must be wholly foreign to it end quote so again this something is the will which schopenhauer argues is more fundamental it's a more fundamental experience than consciousness or sentience or intelligence however you want to call it because clearly life can exist without that different animals different forms of life can have

different levels or types of intellect human beings can have different linguistic frames for interpreting the world different concepts but we all have a will animals exist which likely have no conceptual framework very limited but they still apparently have a will the synoquanon of being is that you have a certain nature which strives towards certain ends and schopenhauer argues as a human being we all have that subjective experience of being a willing being of having a will and that's an inner experience we all have and have only for ourselves since you are yourself a phenomenon your

experience of the will is direct knowledge of the inner nature of a phenomenon of yourself is that phenomenon and thus where the kantian argument is that we only know the world of objects through representations and we can know nothing of the inner contents in schopenhauer's argument well you have direct knowledge of the inner contents of you and what we find when we look there is will and chopinhauer therefore uses this term to describe the inner nature of the true world what they what we'll call the thing in itself and so you know you have the

thing as it appears and then you have the thing in itself the thing is it really is and this is because he believes that the thing in itself as the groundless ground of being must be universal and indivisible that means that any insight into the thing in itself the true world must hold everywhere and always uh in book 2 section 19 he writes quote something in the consciousness of everyone distinguishes the representation of his own body from all others that are in other respects quite like it that is that the body occurs in consciousness in

quite another way toto generate different that is denoted by the word will it is just this double knowledge of our own body which gives us information about that body itself about its action and movement following on motives as well as about its suffering through outside impressions in a word about what it is not as a representation but as something over and above this and hence what it is in itself end quote and so schopenhauer says through this insight of the body existing for us both as our will and as a representation we can understand the

nature of all things in the world phenomena as we experience them are our own representation of the world to ourselves through our sense organs and then through assigning them a conceptual understanding but what lies beneath all things is will a certain nature uh striving towards a certain end um if this is too abstract for you schopenhauer writes in section 21 of book two building on these ideas um that we we have an immediate knowledge of this not just in abstract terms but in concrete terms this is in the form of feeling feeling is the manifestation

of the will within the body he writes that feeling quote makes itself known in an immediate way in which subject and object are not quite clearly distinguished yet it becomes known to the individual himself not as a whole but only in its particular acts and quote and so body and its feelings these are for schopenhauer the entry point for understanding the thing in itself and to expand on why a little more drawing on indian philosophy schopenhauer holds the thing in itself to be non-dualistic dualism in this context means the idea that separate things can exist

independently of one another which means that there is there's such a thing as both being and non-being that you can thus have many distinct beings which are separate entities but these propositions all require us to presuppose things such as space time matter and therefore causality duration impermanence temporality and so on but these are all representations or they all obtain only in the world of representation none of these are known to us none of these laws i just listed or traits of objects that exist none of these are known through direct experience of the inner content

of the world these are laws governing how phenomena behave and interact how objects exist not how the reality which is the foundation for those things behaves doesn't ever escape from the world as it appears and so schopenhauer argues that we've recognized you know after after we've recognized the will as the thing in itself we can proceed to recognize it in all things knowing it in a sort of intuitive sense on the basis that we have an experiential knowledge a direct and experiential knowledge of the inner contents of the world from within ourselves and so dualism

dualistic you know the laws that govern dualism that applies in the world of phenomena to schopenhauer all of these um laws that establish separateness and distinctness wouldn't apply in the world as well in the world in and of itself so i'm going to read a long passage now um where we get a better idea we get the the transference of this concept of the will as the thing in itself to all sorts of processes and even inanimate things in nature such as crystals and the process by which they form we also get schopenhauer's reasoning for

why he chose to call everything a manifestation of will and didn't use some other term and so we're going to be reading again from section 21. quote the reader who with me has gained this conviction will find that of itself it will become key to the knowledge of the innermost being of the whole of nature since he now transfers it to all phenomena that are given to him not like his own phenomenon both in direct and indirect knowledge but in the latter solely and hence merely in a one-sided way as representation alone he will recognize

that same will not only in those phenomenon that are quite similar to his own in men and animals as they're in most nature but continued reflection will lead him to recognize that force that shoots and vegetates in the plant indeed the force by which the crystal is formed the force that turns the magnet to the north pole the force whose shock he encounters from the contact of metals of different kinds the force that appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction separation and union and finally even gravitation which acts so powerfully in

all matter pulling the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun all these he will recognize as different only in the phenomenon but the same according to their inner nature he will recognize them all as that which is immediately known to him so intimately and better than everything else and where it appears most distinctly is called will it is only this application of reflection which no longer lets us stop at the phenomenon but leads us on to the thing in itself all representation be it of whatever kind it may all object is phenomenon

but only the will is thing in itself as such it is not representation at all but toto generi different they're from it is that of which all representation all object is the phenomenon the visibility the objectivity it is the inner most essence the kernel of every particular thing and also of the whole it appears in every blindly acting force of nature and also in the deliberate conduct of man and the great difference between the two concerns only the degree of the manifestation not the inner nature of what is manifested end quote so i think that

it clarifies a lot of this um to clarify the last sentence there actually there's no more will in the human being than in say the crystal or the stone or the animal even though the human is a more complex phenomenon the will is for schopenhauer everywhere and always the same and indivisible it's very similar to concepts in indian philosophy like the atman in that respect physical reality is not separate and not separable from this single essence which cannot be divided from itself at any point it only divides into different representations within the world of appearances

but as he says actually later on in book three which we'll cover next week that if we agree with plato this world of appearances is simply a dreamlike reality in which all things eventually pass away um it's you know he he likens the world of representation to being more like a dream than the world as pure will which is the real character of the world and so the will is equally distributed everywhere it is the background substance of all being just as much in man as in animals or plants and schopenhauer even includes forces such

as magnetism in his description of things that are simply objectifications of the will so why the term will aside from the explanation he's already given why not make up a new term rather than choose a term like will which might carry connotative or cultural baggage well schopenhauer says we have to borrow from the lexicon of familiar things in order to name the thing in itself even though the thing in itself is not correlated with anything in particular and the best word to choose is derived from man's will because this is our term for the only

direct experience we have with the thing in itself which is our own inner experience the name is chosen because quote the direct knowledge of which lies nearest to us and leads to the indirect knowledge of all others end quote so schopenhauer suggests that coming up with a new word would only be appropriate for something truly and purely in the abstract something for which the facts are only inferred and never directly experienced but our direct experience does exist and it's through the will and so schopenhauer he also justifies that his choice of the word will with

the term force which he could have chosen and personally i think that would have been a fine word to use but the problem schopenhauer has is much the same as the issue he has with inventing a new word force is too abstract he says he says quote if we refer to the concept of force to that of will we have in fact referred something more unknown to something infinitely better known indeed to the one thing really known to us immediately and completely end quote so his argument is that we had really nothing explanatory by calling

the thing in itself a force or designating it as force will is something that we understand that we experience in our desires and in our emotions we haven't expanded the meaning by calling it force instead the concept would remain abstract but consider it the other way around which is what schopenhauer actually does we can understand what a force is through the concept of will and in schopenhauer's view at least we actually do add new understanding to the concept of force that is understanding what a force might be as the thing in itself um force as

such by reflecting on and meditating upon our own experience of having a will and acting upon the world in accord with that will we might gain an understanding of what a force is and so we don't gain anything by calling it the world as force instead of the world as well but the other way around does that something and um now i think schopenhauer is correct here the word will does give additional meaning uh whether or not he's correct that what a force is is actually um you know comparable to the subjective experience of the

will uh whether you find that compelling or not that that is the argument he's making um i watched a conversation about schopenhauer between uh brian mcgee and frederick copelston while i was doing research for this episode and uh mcgee wished that schopenhauer utilized the term energy and he suggested that physicists of the modern day have come to something similar to this understanding um cobalt argued back that energy is a good term but only for like the fundamental nature of the phenomenal world right the world of representation not for the pneumanon and i think mcgee actually

might have not not really understood the phenomena numinous split which a lot of people don't even very intelligent people but copeland was keen to point out chopin hower really believed he was breaking through to the pneumanon to the world in itself by drawing on our intuitive understanding of the will this is an ontological claim schopenhauer is actually not talking about what we would call energy he's literally talking about will as the fundamental nature of reality and so copeldstone questions as i'm sure many of you are doing whether schopenhauer really broke through to the thing in

itself in so many words and copelston said he defers more to kant and thinks this phenomena numina split or divide remains pretty firm and nietzsche might actually agree with this assessment uh in my view but i hope what i've conveyed here um might help to explain how schopenhauer was doing philosophy in a way that appealed to nietzsche um in that he's beginning from himself and his own consciousness his own awareness his own immediate certainties in order to philosophize and so schopenhauer is rather like descartes in that respect he's counseling the subject who's reading along with

him go back to the foundations of what the individual knows for himself by direct experience but where to cut descartes found thought as the fundamental subjective experience kojito ergosome i think therefore i am notice that schopenhauer instructs us to look instead to something different feeling desire want and a word the passions this is the gateway to understanding the fundamental reality not intellect or thoughts but passions and ultimately he's only using these passions to indicate something even more fundamental because the term will is only an approximation right so that's this is the starting point of the

schopenhauerian philosophical approach look to yourself to your immediate certainties within your subjective experience we all have these objects which we represent to ourselves which is only seeing the outside what is superficial to the object but we have this one object which we can see the inside of which is our own body and what we find on the inside of the body exists within all phenomena because all phenomena are the objectification of a reality which is not itself divided or distinct or different it's not itself an object it's not objectified now one might ask at this

point what it really means to say that everything is merely will why shouldn't we simply follow the scientific method to determine the true character of what reality is um again that's the same problem with the understanding of mcgee where he's talking with coppelston to this i would simply say no amount of science can ever break us out of the limitations of empiricism the world as we know it we receive through the senses schopenhauer accepted this fully and believed that the only way we could thus posit anything about the world as such is through reason and

this is by making those synthetic judgments a priori that we discussed in episode 16. the episode on the congenital defect of philosophers and so as a refresher these are conclusions one can draw which provides new information strictly through the investigation of logical concepts strictly through applying reason to those concepts which we know to be true and extrapolating conclusions by those means so what schopenhauer is doing here or at least this is his attempt the use of reason to leap over the phenomena numina chasm and notice um this his his project when we take a step

back and look at in the grand scheme of things it's the same thing that we see of going all the way back to the pre-platonic philosophers you might call to mind the definition that nietzsche gave in those lectures about who the philosopher is and what the philosopher does philosophy is the art of representing universal existence in terms of abstract concepts and that's what schopenhauer is doing his attempt is to provide an explanation for universal existence his major problem to overcome is that western philosophy had become obsessed and had this fixation on how we only know

the outer appearance of existence and not its inner character and so this is the first task which he must solve at least for himself by drawing on what he knows subjectively to be the inner character of existence and so another phenomena to consider is the animals from all accounts animals act without representations they don't have the kinds of sophisticated minds that we have rather they engage in blind activity with no representation of the object of their goal whether animals actually have representations or not is beside the point to schopenhauer because he says they act as

though motive is unknown to them they act as though they have no conceptual understanding so if they don't live in this world of representation at least not to the degree that we do that isn't to say animals don't have knowledge but what they have is what we'll call direct knowledge right it's not intellectual or abstract knowledge the animal that shows how the will works even without the aid of representation the faculty of representation is not necessary for the will's activity in fact in most phenomena there's no awareness or self-awareness of the will at all it

is simply a blind striving that would be the case with gravity for example schopenhauer argues that gravity like all forces or laws that we perceive in nature represents the will in its blindest form of striving which is distributed in all things with mass and is simply this tendency this will for large objects with mass to accumulate more mass to themselves gravity acts as a force and a constraint in all phenomena as they in turn will themselves to exist and so gravity tries to constrain all things with mass and then these things amass with with mass

you know emerge such as animals which strive not to be constrained schopenhauer prefigures nietzsche in characterizing the driving force behind the actions of all things as blind causes rather than conscious motives um and he even extends this to mankind he he sources these causes to the nerves into external stimuli he writes in book 2 section 23 quote all that occurs in the body must occur through will through here this will is not guided by knowledge not determined accorded according to motives but acts blindly according to causes called in this case stimuli end quote and so

he then discusses at length in the same passage why stimuli shape the existence of all living things and his final step is to account for things even without organs without nervous systems and without physiology these are things without any receptivity to stimulus without any motive or knowledge at all and so that includes phenomena like we talked about before like the law of gravity he also lists quote the powerful irresistible impulse with which masses of water rush downwards end quote or quote let us look at the crystal being rapidly and suddenly formed with such regularity of

configuration it is obvious that this is only a perfectly definite and precisely determined striving in different directions constrained and held firm by coagulation end quote and so the reason for bringing all this up this link between mankind and the animals and blind forces set further in the same passage still in 23 here schopenhauer lays it out explicitly that what we do as beings that exist in the light of knowledge is fundamentally the same activity that all the objectified forms of the will engage in he writes quote let us observe the choice with which bodies repel

and attract one another unite and separate when set free in the fluid state and released from bonds of rigidity finally we feel directly and immediately how a burden which hampers our body by its gravitation towards the earth increasingly presses and squeezes this body in pursuit of its one tendency if we observe all this it will not cost us a great effort of the imagination to recognize once more our own inner nature even at so great a distance it is that which in us pursues its ends by the light of knowledge but here in the fieblist

of phenomena only strives blindly in a dull one-sided and unalterable manner end quote so i know at this point the dire materialists among the audience are probably still fairly perplexed or frustrated why regard the world as will except in perhaps a poetic manner you know the materialist is probably still waiting on some material evidence that he can use to explain the material world uh tautological as that is or perhaps you know the modern materials materialist even realizes the hopelessness of such an endeavor and has abandoned the very pursuit of providing a universal explanation for existence

in the form of concepts and to this type of person i will employ the rhetoric of appealing to them along the conceptual lines they're probably more comfortable with by pointing out that schopenhauer is in a sense operating from a very skeptical stance here rather than a stance of credulity even though it perhaps might not seem like it and perhaps schopenhauer is even being more skeptical than the average materialists are being and to explain why this is uh we'll go back into schopenhauer's epistemology which is largely the subject of the first book the part which is

most heavily indebted to kant um although const influence is all over the whole work and kant is generally known he's generally known for attempting to salvage many of our metaphysical or moral prejudices through the use of rigorous logic but we also have to recognize that kant wrote a text critiquing reason and delimiting the boundaries of what reason could explain much of kant's contribution to philosophy is actually in more rigorously laying out what logic cannot do and schopenhauer is right alongside him in that and so schopenhauer provides a more straightforward version of kant's arguments which is

not a hard thing to do to be more straightforward than kant but he provides a more straightforward version of khan's arguments and the limitations of reason contrasted with what we do have sufficient reason to believe and schopenhauer sums up this whole postcontinent epistemology as follows and this is in section one at the very beginning of the whole book quote no truth is more certain more independent of all others than this namely that everything that exists for knowledge and hence the whole of this world is only object in relation to the subject perception of the perceiver

in a word representation naturally this holds good to the present as well as of the past and future of what is remotest as well as what is nearest for it holds good of time and space themselves in which alone all these distinctions arise everything that in any way belongs and can belong to the world is inevitably associated with this being conditioned by the subject and it exists only for the subject the world is representation end quote schopenhauer then quotes in the same section sir william jones from the book on the philosophy of the asiatics which

establishes this attempt of schopenhauers to syncretize kantianism with indian philosophy which makes schopenhauer so interesting to me so schopenhauer quotes jones as follows quote the fundamental tenet of the vedanta school consisted not in denying the existence of matter that is of solidity impenetrability and extended figure to deny which would be lunacy but in correcting the popular notion of it and in contending that it has no essence independent of mental perception that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms end quote and schopenhauer's comment on that quotation we just read is quote these words adequately express the compatibility

of empirical reality with transcendental reality end quote and that is really that's the kantian master stroke of epistemology right and schopenhauer puts it into such easy to understand terms there's some kind of transcendental reality behind the senses which we can't have direct knowledge of but we can know that it exists it transcends what we can glean through empirical sense data how do we then come up with a picture of the world which is compatible with both views of reality both with the empirical view and with the transcendental view that's what the kantian or the schopenhauerian

is aiming for and why such a person might not be inclined to accept the view of objects as merely material which is somehow explained by material or to say that everything is explained by the laws of nature we can perceive the laws of nature again only through the way they affect objects or appear within the behavior of the world of phenomena the laws of nature are relative to the world of phenomena and so the kind of world that schopenhauer is pondering in so far as he's talking about the world as will can't be explained with

scientific endeavors ever doesn't ever get there um to expand a little further uh of what we mean by this uh that we you know experience the laws of nature through objects we have to talk about the principle of sufficient reason which i'm not going to get super into in this episode but we have to talk about it at least a little bit so in section 4 schopenhauer discusses how the existence of all matter as we know it must presuppose the concepts of time and space just as a precondition for the existence of matter you have

to believe in time and space causality which is where time and space intersect must also presuppose time and space by that token and so schopenhauer writes quote the law of causality receives its meaning and necessity only from the fact that the essence of change does not consist in the mere variation of states or conditions in themselves on the contrary it consists in the fact that at the same place in space there is now one condition or state and then another and at one in the same point in time there is here this state and there

that state end quote and skipping further through the passage quote change i.e variation according to causal law always concerns a particular part of space in a particular part of time simultaneously and in the union consequently causality unites space and time end quote and so he's arguing here from the position of pointing out what he would call a priori knowledge about the world just by our means of perceiving the world of our perception of the world um we gain this a prior knowledge and this comes you know from our perception of duration impenetrability divisibility permanence mobility

and so on there are a number of traits or aspects of matter that follow logically from the very idea of distinct objects existing within space and time this is to put it simply what schopenhauer calls the principle of sufficient reason knowledge of the subject of the object of the relationship between them which contains within it time space and causality the principle of sufficient reason is how we it's uh it's the basis of understanding what governs the world of phenomena it's his means of giving a shorthand for the axioms that we have to accept from as

a matter of course and just in the practice of applying reason to the world as we experience it which is the world of appearances and so we experience objects and phenomena that are subject to causality which means they exist in space and time and have limitations within those dimensions and so on um and this all follows from the principle of sufficient reason in chopin harr's view he puts this very straightforwardly in section seven still in book one where he writes that time space and causality quote belong only to the object yet because they are essential

to the object as such they can be found also from the subject in other words they can be known a priori and the to this extent are to be regarded as the boundary common to both but they can all be referred to one common expression the principle of sufficient reason end quote and so this is an a priori judgment time and space are necessitated by the existence of objects and thus the existence of objects can lead us to extrapolate to the conclusion that there is time and space right without an understanding of the principle of

sufficient reason you know without an understanding of causality and permanence and duration and all that then there is no coherent representation of the world that's not possible without the principle of sufficient reason this is part of what makes mankind such a complex manifestation of the will what schopenhauer would call a more complete or more visible objectification of the will's nature we have the principle of sufficient reason which allows us to make these sophisticated representations of the world and which allows our will to pursue and strive after ever more individuated and ever more complex aims since

the world of phenomena is this world of representation this would imply that the quote unquote world experienced by lower animals or by something which merely blindly wills through its drives and by means of stimuli would not be anything like our own world this might not even properly be called a world at all except insofar as it's part of the world as will a certain degree of intellect or or a degree of consciousness is required to represent the world as humans have done schopenhauer writes this is back in section four quote all causality hence all matter

and consequently the whole of reality is only for the understanding through the understanding in the understanding the first simplest present manifestation of understanding is perception of the actual world this is in every way knowledge of the cause from the effect and therefore all perception is intellectual end quote further down in the same passage he writes quote what the eye the ear or the hand experiences is not perception it is mere data only by passing of the understanding from the effect to the cause does the world stand out as perception extended in space varying in respect

to form persisting through all time as regards matter end quote so without our interpretation of the sense data through a conceptual framework and schopenhauer's view there is no reality in the sense that we would normally conceive of reality um which is the world of representation this is this is how schopenhauer interprets and carries on kant's transcendental idealism this is how he understood it the world we live in is not direct contact with an objective reality and we don't interface with reality from an absolute perspective but the world we live in is also not an idealistic

creation of subjective experience that would be a collapse into berkeley and idealism or worse a collapse into solipsism schopenhauer basically sees both views as fundamentally mistaken the world is not strictly a world of objects or strictly a world of matter that can be explained solely in material terms the world is is not all you know on the other hand a purely subjective generation of the consciousness those two approaches are sort of what he sees as like the two big errors of epistemology and he classes the first of those two as materialism as i've also called

it and his criticism of materialism is as follows objects can't be separated from representations he doesn't believe that representations can be their own explanation materialism leaves out the subject in schopenhauer's view it tries to take causality for example and treat it as an eternal fact but schopenhauer constantly reminds us that we only have perception of this fact or any facts through the intersection of subject and object of knower and known he establishes this framework early on in the text in section 2 where he explains that each person is the knowing subject where is their body

as an object or representation and therefore for schopenhauer the subject object distinction is a priori and universal subject and object in his framing of it corresponds also to knower and known for anything to be known there must be a knower and without an object to be known the knower can't exist either because then there would be nothing to be known and so you don't really have a knower and so he writes quote that which knows all things and is known by none is the subject everyone finds himself as the subject end quote and then further

down he writes quote whatever exists exists only for the subject end quote and so again it's only through the intellect that we can make the conceptual framework of causality in order to represent the world to ourselves as the knower schopenhauer's problem with materialism is that it assumes a dead world it assumes that objects can exist without a subject which he thinks is impossible um you know he believes that's nonsensical it's saying the known can exist without the the knower material objects aren't real for schopenhauer unless they're represented by the knower without the knower to represent

reality we have no way of knowing that there is any reality and um you know now obviously schopenhauer does believe something still exists independent of knowing he would say that's the world as will but that isn't a world with objects or knowable things this isn't a world we can conceptualize um or rather once we do conceptualize about it it becomes objectified and therefore becomes part of the world of representation right so that's the that's the trap of the phenomena numinous split material is something which schopenhauer considers therefore indirectly given to us because it comes to

us through the sense organs what what we do directly know in schopenhauer's view is the immediate knowledge of the representation the representation um is the only thing we have direct knowledge of but we don't we don't actually know that any material is really out there for whatever that might mean and in order to have the justification to designate the world as material because the status of being a material thing is simply a conceptual designation so it's a second order it's a conceptualization or an interpretation so that's the indirect aspect right um of what is directly

given to us which is the representation the direct empirical experience and so we're explaining what we directly experience the representation in terms of something we would be experiencing only indirectly which is this conception of the material world schopenhauer also seems to find it absurd that we might explain things like will or consciousness through sheer matter personally i think that is cuts to the quick of schopenhauer you know they're his reasons for rejecting materialism it just doesn't suit his taste he's part of the german idealistic tradition which is largely opposed to vulgar materialism and scientism and

he believes a metaphysical stance to be essential as a grounding to any pursuit of knowledge and he's also as we said enamored with the indian philosophers who hold that the world is leela or a playing of forces within this world of illusion and that the true reality behind the veil of maya is an undifferentiated indivisible unity now on the other hand the opposite side of the issue schopenhauer also criticizes like what you might call vulgar idealism and he uses ficta as his whipping boy here he calls ficta's philosophy fictitious and his problem with victor is

that he leaves out the objective he thinks victor thinks that all reality flows forth from the subject and he thinks fikta's philosophical mistake is in taking the principle of sufficient reason which again includes our knowledge of objects and subjects time and space and causality figta takes this and makes it absolute and this is not an absolute schopenhauer argues the principle of sufficient reason is relative and conditioned it exists within the world of phenomena which we experience schweppenhauer writes quote with ficta by virtue of the principle of sufficient reason as an eternal veritas the ego is

the ground of the world or of the non-ego the object which is just its consequent its product end quote sofikta's mistake is making the thing in itself into a subject a knower as an independent entity which is not dependent on the objective world and in this sense he makes the world in itself equivalent with god and with bishop berkeley's idealism but schopenhauer thinks the subject object distinction even only obtains in the world of phenomena in the world of representation in fact the thing in itself is not the knower and it's not the subject it's the

groundless ground of both which is the will the will in chopin hours view is what creates the very possibility of there being a knower and a known it's the driving force that brings those things into existence schopenhauer is insistent that all of these laws that we perceive the law of physics the laws that govern relationships and interactions of material objects don't reveal anything about this indivisible thing in itself that's the real character of reality and so he sums up his disagreement with both these schools of metaphysical thought as follows and we're still reading from section

seven quote the philosophy of ficta not otherwise even worth mention is of interest to us only as the real opposite of the old and original materialism making a belated appearance materialism was the most consistent system starting from the object as this system was the most consistent starting from the subject materialism overlooked the fact that with the simplest object it has at once posited the subject as well so ficta too overlooked the fact that with the subject let him give it whatever title he likes he posited the object since no subject is thinkable without object end

quote and so materialism and idealism and all their vulgarity and incompleteness are both what schopenhauer would classify as the errors and the pitfalls brought on by the development of reason schopenhauer argues that logic is a sort of second order derivation on perception direct perception is a pure form of knowledge and so the development of reason is not a holy good thing he writes in section 10 quote reason is feminine in nature it can give only after it has received end quote and then skipping further down the passage he says quote concepts in general exist only

after previous representations of perception and in reference to these lies their whole nature end quote in other words conception is secondary to perception and the double meaning of the term conception in english is apropos of the meaning of calling reason feminine in nature reason is a means of coming to judgments by examining abstract concepts but the concepts themselves are derived from what schopenhauer calls immediate knowledge which is the perception of the world and again it acts according to the principle of sufficient reason um and so you have to take in the sense data before you

as the raw material that reason then needs to do concept formation and chopin howard goes so far as to say that in actual thought we conduct our thinking in accord with immediate knowledge and leave logic unused he elaborates on this argument in detail in section 14 asserting that we follow habitual conceptual frameworks in actual practice and that much of our thinking in terms of perceiving and interpreting the world is spontaneous and automatic in fact the ability to employ logic in order to do things like represent complex philosophical problems is not a trait shared by all

and more importantly it's not trait needed by most he's critical of how concept formation can and has led to errors and how it allows rhetoricians to mislead people he writes in section 8 quote as from the direct light of the sun to the borrowed reflected light of the moon so do we pass from the immediate representation of perception which stands by itself and is its own warrant to reflection to the abstract discursive concepts of reason which have their whole content only from that knowledge of perception and in relation to it as long as our attitude

is one of pure perception all is clear firm and certain there are neither questions nor doubts nor errors end quote further down the passage he writes quote with abstract knowledge with the faculty of reason doubt and error have appeared in the theoretical care and remorse in the practical if in the representation of perception illusion does at moments distort reality then in the representation of the abstract error can reign for thousands of years impose its iron yolk on whole nations stifle the noblest impulse of mankind end quote and so unsurprisingly what we have here is an

attitude very similar to plato when we consider all that has been said thus far schopenhauer believes that with a higher degree of intellect one can gain a more complete understanding of reality a truer perception of reality such that in the platonic sense the truly wise person does actually see more than the average person but many people will be misled by you know the shadows on the cave wall and the deception of the shadow puppets being paraded around to do people with these errors of thought the wise person goes out into the sunlight of wisdom but

the key thing here so the intellect couple takeaways from that these kinds of considerations here intellect is not an unmitigated good but also even though a lot of people are enslaved by errors um a truly transcendent intellect could effectively perceive a different world from the one that ordinary people do um really the last thing we'll talk about today on this very long episode will be this is where another element where we bring in plato because the the other huge influence of plato on schopenhauer's metaphysics is the theory of ideas um also known as the theory

of forms it's a bit confusing because sometimes the title of schopenhauer's book is translated as world as will and idea rather than the translation i have translates it as world of will world as will and representation but i don't like the translation saying world is of as will an idea because representations and ideas in chopin however's philosophy are actually two distinct terms he directly references plato's theory of ideas in the book and the platonic idea it's totally separate thing from just the general term representation a representation is any perception of any object or phenomena in

the world that's known by the knowing subject the way schopenhauer uses the platonic forms or the platonic ideas is not to refer to the representations themselves what he was referring to is the gradations of the representations and what this means will require further explanation as i mentioned before schopenhauer argues there isn't more of the will in a man than there is in a stone the will is one at all times and always everywhere equally distributed the way he thinks about it instead is the degree to which the will is revealed which is to say objectified

or manifested which is to say perceived and represented and so this is what he means he says in in in this respect there's more visible will in a plant than in a stone there's more visible will in the animal than in the plant and there's more in the human than in the animal the will reveals itself becomes more and more visible more realized in these higher and higher forms and so these gradations then of different classes of things men animals stones to put it in descending order or even then with the laws of physics gravity

causality and so on these are all to be understood synonymously with plato's theory of ideas all of these are objectifications of the will but they exist at a different gradient at a different gradation schopenhauer argues that kant misused the word idea and he clarifies that he uses the term in the platonic sense he quotes diogenes laertes who gives the shortest and most concise description of the platonic doctrine quote plato teaches that the ideas exist in nature so to speak as patterns or prototypes and that the remainder of things only resemble them and exist as their

copies end quote and then to clarify how platonic ideas fit into his own philosophical system schopenhauer writes quote by idea i understand every definite and fixed grade of the will's objectification end quote so what has taken shape so far this is an atheistic world it's a world without any meaning other than the will blindly striving to exist in every conceivable pattern or another and the will is represented in one form or another by these conscious beings that have been been called out of it its uh bosom to experience it as beings with an intellect and

that's the human condition this is at bottom a senseless world it's not created by an intelligence or redeemed by a god the world at its base is something totally unintelligent the will and this will is not sentient or conscious in the sense of a god or a personal being but the will is you could say it's consciousness itself sort of in the sense of the atman and the doctrine of advaita vedanta will exists as the consciousness of all beings so that we can't say that it's without consciousness because we're conscious and we are the will

and so schopenhauer quotes a mystic and jealous selesius who wrote quote i know god cannot live a moment without me if i should come to naught he too must cease to be end quote and so in chopin hour's argument that's like a mystical epiphany of the coterminous nature of the will with all being which one experiences directly in their own consciousness um only with silesius it's represented in religious language it's you know it's interpreted as the consciousness of the godhead being synonymous with the consciousness of of selesius himself with the knowing subject but so this

omnipresent will has consciousness only in its manifest forms in the objectified or the represented form in its essence the will is blind and although perhaps it has that like immediate intelligence that schopenhauer ascribes even to the animals and seemingly even to forces or physical laws you know inanimate objects the immediate knowledge pushes the phenomenon in a certain direction and this is felt and not thought it's non-rational or we might even say pre-rational and that's the essence of everything and so in this schema schopenhauer then brings in the platonic forms as a means of explaining or

classifying all the different phenomena within that uh world as will and representation and the the gradations are according to how fully the will is revealed or made visible in all of these different things um and you know the the the term he uses is principium uh individuationist the principle of individuation representations come into existence by becoming distinct from other phenomena and so schopenhauer says you know the lowest gradation of the will the most general ideas ideas here in the platonic platonic sense are the laws of nature themselves so gravity um and so he writes in

section 27. this is in book two quote we should see the will express itself here and the lowest grade as blind striving an obscure inarticulate impulse far from susceptible of being directly known it is the simplest and the weakest mode of its objectification but it appears as this blind and unconscious striving in the whole of unorganized nature and all those original forces of which it is the work of physics and chemistry to discover and to study the laws and each of which manifest itself to us in millions of phenomena which are exactly some similar and

regular and show no trace of individual character but our mere multiplicity through space and time i.e through the principium individuationists as a picture is multiplied through the facets of a glass end quote so the laws that obtain over everything in reality like gravity how does gravity exist well it exists as properties as a property of objects with mass right so the lowest gradations of the will and schopenhauer's view exist as properties or facets of all phenomena they're so generalized that they lack all individual expression and so gravity exists equally in all objects with mass or

rather distributed equally through all mass itself i guess we could say you know you might have more mass in a certain area but mass itself all has gravity and so the story of the world for schopenhauer is the story of the will striving for higher and higher gradations higher objectifications of itself which means more individuated more visible more perceptible objectifications so at the lowest gradation we have forces at higher gradations we get inanimate objects than plants lower organisms each of them has more potential to manifest uniqueness and individuality to be a distinct thing which is

the very nature of the world of representation everything makes its own distinct specific demand on reality in whatever form it takes and it's driven by its own purposes its own goals its own names which then clash with all these other representations of the will and therefore through this striving and inevitably through conflict the will is more fully revealed the more particular and contrived desires dictate the higher gradations or patterns in which the manifested will take shape and so eventually then we get to mankind where these types or patterns become so specific that schopenhauer argues each

man could very well be his own platonic idea and so he writes in section 28 quote the character of each individual man so far as it is thoroughly individual and not entirely included in that of the species may be regarded as a special idea corresponding to a special act of the objectification of will end quote so whereas in lower species of animals the species differ from one another but you know one ant doesn't differ too greatly from another ant of the same species and man the differences can be so extreme people can be aimed at

ends or goals which are mutually exclusive and incompatible with one another people live in such extremely different environments and have such wildly differing cultural norms and societal standards and moral agendas and so schopenhauer considers man to be the most sophisticated and most visible objectification of the will that exists and he effectively starts from man as the justification of reality and the origin of reality um not the origin of the numeral world the world of the will but in terms of the world of representation that schopenhauer believes man can't mankind the subject to be a sort

of precondition of right and so he writes in section 28 quote in order to manifest the full significance of the will the idea of man would need to appear not alone and sundered from everything else but accompanied by the whole species of grades down through all the forms of animals through the vegetable kingdom to unorganized nature all these supplement each other in the complete objectification of will they are as much presupposed by the idea of man as the blossoms of a tree presupposed leaves branches stem and root they form a pyramid of which man is

the apex if fond of similes one might also say that their manifestations accompany that of man as necessarily as the full daylight is accompanied by all the gradations of twilight through which little by little it loses itself in darkness or one might call them the echo of man and say animal and plant are the descending fifth and third of man the inorganic kingdom is the lower octave end quote and so you'll find many more music metaphors for describing these metaphysical positions if you decide to reach open hour for yourself what is implied by this passage

is these gradations depend on one another mankind does not and cannot sensibly exist outside of an ecosystem that mankind depends on mankind exists independence on that ecosystem and thus also independence on weather patterns and climate and geological processes and all the laws governing that and so on and so forth until we conclude that man depends on the most rudimentary objectifications of the will the physical laws just as well as he needs other animals and plants in order to find sustenance and so further down in the passage schopenhauer writes quote we find however that the inner

necessity of the gradation of its manifestations which is inseparable from the adequate objectification of the will is expressed by an outer necessity in the whole of these manifestations themselves by reason of which man has need of the beasts for his support the beasts and their grades have need of each other as well as of plants which in turn require the ground water chemical elements and their combinations the planet the sun rotation and motion around the sun the curve of the ellipse etc etc at bottom this results from the fact that the will must live on

itself for there exists nothing beside it and it is a hungry will hints arise eager pursuit anxiety and suffering end quote in short everything survives by consuming and dominating the lower gradations of existence the will exists in a constant state of strife with itself ever moving in directions which never ultimately satisfy it every pursuit brings at best a momentary relief for the will as ever hungry and what satisfies one manifestation of the will means the destruction of another think of the good of the owl versus the good of the mouse the various gradations of the

will can therefore never know peace in the world of representation as they strive to exist that striving brings them into conflict with others and the contest never ends because the will is never satisfied and from this assessment you may be starting to get a picture of the depressing world that schopenhauer established in his writing and just why it is he's considered the great pessimist but we won't get fully into that until the next episode but uh we'll look at one more passage and this passage is in section 29 and that's at the end of book

two and uh it elaborates on this vision of the world and will perhaps titillate you further as to the depressing nature of schopenhauer's outlook he writes quote in fact freedom from all aim from all limits belongs to the nature of the will which is an endless striving this was already touched on above in the reference to centrifugal force it also discloses itself in its simplest form and the lowest grade of the objectification of will and gravitation which we see constantly exerting itself though a final goal is obviously impossible for it for if according to its

will all existing matter were collected in one mass yet within this mass gravity ever striving towards the center would still wage war with impenetrability as rigidity or elasticity the tendency of matter can therefore only be confined never completed or appeased but this is precisely the case with all tendencies of all phenomena of will every attained end is also the beginning of a new course and so on add infinitum the plant raises its manifestation from the seed through the stem and the leaf to the blossom and the fruit which again is the beginning of a new

seed a new individual that runs through the old course and so on through endless time such also is the life of the animal procreation is its highest point and after attaining to it the life of the first individual quickly or slowly sinks while a new life ensures to nature the endurance of the species and repeats the same phenomena indeed the constant renewal of the matter of every organism is also to be regarded as merely the manifestation of this continual pressure and change and physiologists are now ceasing to hold that it is the necessary reparation of

the matter wasted in motion for the possible wearing out of the machine can by no means be equivalent to the support it is constantly receiving through nourishment eternal becoming endless flux characterizes the revelation of the inner nature of will finally the same thing shows itself in human endeavors and desires which always dilute us by presenting their satisfaction as the final end of will as soon as we attain to them they no longer appear the same and therefore they soon grow stale are forgotten and though not openly disowned are yet always thrown aside as vanished illusions

we are fortunate enough if there still remains something to wish for and to strive after that the game may be kept up of constant transition from desire to satisfaction and from satisfaction to a new desire the rapid course of which is called happiness and the slow course sorrow and does not sink into that stagnation that shows itself and fearful enwi that paralyzes life vain yearning without a definite object deadening languer according to all this when the will is enlightened by knowledge it always knows what it wills now and here never what it wills in general

every particular act of will has its end the whole will has none just as every particular phenomenon of nature is determined by a sufficient cause so far as concerns its appearance in this place at this time but the force which manifests itself in it has no general cause for it belongs to thing in itself to the groundless will end quote and so we gain an insight into the inner truth of nature by looking to our own will what is the nature of that will it's never satisfied willing is the underlying process of reality that's the

vision here when one attains one of the will's specific goals one of their own goals this does nothing to change the will's general goal or its general character its general character is to strive and seek and pursue and desire not to be satisfied not to have its desires sated but to continue desiring and so once those desires are fulfilled suddenly the will's no longer satiated by what it just before seemed like it couldn't bear not to have and this is schopenhauer's explanation of both the inner character of our own lives and of reality itself as

abstract and overly conceptual as this episode has probably been for many of you if you've stuck it out to the very end hopefully you can now see the connection between schopenhauer's attitude towards life and his metaphysics the fundamental western orientation towards philosophy was through this idea of the two worlds the world of mere appearance in the world as such plato and kant had affirmed this division and schopenhauer embraced them both fully and sought to synthesize them and this idea that had seized him at a young age such that he wrote world as will and representation

at 28 didn't change at all for the rest of his life and i think this comes from schopenhauer's temperament and what he found i think to match his temperament philosophically he found from the ancients in the form of vedic philosophy and this idea around which the rest of his philosophy is a mere elaboration is that conviction that he expresses at the end that all life all existence is at bottom of one character and that it has a single intelligible character which exists beyond any of its individual representations and that finally because it is one we

can gain an awareness of what this one is because we're part and parcel with it and by investigating ourselves in our own awareness we can come to understand it as the will this will is as he elaborates later the will to exist the will to be every individual objectification of the will strives against one another making the world of representation a battleground but for all this horror and strife the true world which is itself blind will is never divided never dies nor is born never passes away or changes and so we have the agreement with

those you know among the indian philosophers and schopenhauer the simultaneous assertion that the world is already pure and liberated and free in every respect and yet the world as we experience it is one of injustice and violence and tragedy because our nature is to strive and to cling to existence against all these laws of nature that eventually overcome us and subsume us we live in suffering in a state of either want or dissatisfaction now if only a person could use this power of reflection that we've gained the ability for representing the world which still comes

to us through the will right it's bestowed onto us by the will striving such for individuality that it creates these beings that can represent the world into concepts but what if there's some way man could take advantage of his existence at this point as the highest gradient of the will's manifestations in order to free himself from the suffering of the world a person that could attain that kind of liberation would be able to use their reason to perceive the world in a different way and perhaps by seeing the illusory dreamlike nature of phenomena one could

rationally come to understand that desiring such phenomena is ultimately unsatisfying and perhaps by that realization you could train the mind to stop striving but since striving is the very character of the will and the will is the world that means a rejection of the world and that's where schopenhauer's philosophy all leads but we'll talk about that next week because we're already way over on time from what i imagined we'd be um but you get a long episode this week um all right hopefully it'll be even darker and colder by then at least for us folks

in the northern hemisphere join me next tuesday where we discuss part two schopenhauer the great pessimist signing off if you imagine in so far as it is approximately possible the sum total of distress pain and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on the earth as on the moon and if here is there the surface were still in a crystalline condition you can look upon our

life as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness in any case even he who has found life tolerably bearable will the longer he lives feel the more clearly that on the whole it is a disappointment nay a cheat if two men who were friends and youth meet in old age after a lapse of an entire generation the principle feeling the sight of one another linked as it is with the recollections of earlier years will arouse in both will be one of total disappointment with the whole of life which once lay so far before

them in the rosy dawn of youth promised so much and performed so little end quote that's from the essay on the suffering of the world from section nine i wanted to start with the unrestrained unadulterated absolutely life-denying side of schopenhauer this week some would say pence's only side but if you've been following along since the last episode hopefully i made at least some impression about how schopenhauer is you know he's willing to restrain his attitude of absolute sorrow and lamentation uh at least within the context of his rigorous philosophical arguments in order to lay out

his picture of the world and his picture of human life within that world um to give his epistemological framework for philosophizing and his ontological claims um about you know what the world really is we went through um i would say a very methodical in tone first couple of books last week um the world is both our representation of it because that is how we come to know anything about the world of objects and phenomena and the laws governing that world and the world is will because the will is our insight into the thing in itself

into the inner character of all those objects and laws but schopenhauer's ethical conclusions from this picture of the world turn towards an attitude of complete cynicism and the idea that life itself is not worth living uh insofar as there are any ethical imperatives for us all in this life it is to achieve a negation or denial of the will um and the reason as given is that this world is fundamentally an aimless thing which is ruled by suffering as we discussed at the end of the last episode as far as schopenhauer sees it the will

is never satisfied it may satisfy an individual aim but its nature is willing not satisfaction and so as soon as the individual aims are fulfilled uh the willing goes on in the form of new desires new willing phenomena new objectifications new pursuits new hunger i remember he says it is a hungry will ever hungry it's a hunger that can never be satiated and thus the inherent character of our existence is one of endless frustration and dissatisfaction so in this episode part two it may even be darker than the last one but also this episode is

going to contain schopenhauer's gospel which you know gospel of course means good news um which is uh a bit funny to say in the context of how dark strobe and how his philosophy is but his good news is the denial of the will that we mentioned which is only possible for human beings why is that well skipping back into section 7 of the same essay on the suffering of the world schopenhauer writes how knowledge creates uh greater suffering than before just to recap briefly you know we were talking last time about how everything in the

world is will that includes inorganic objects plants animals human beings and so on and so only human beings can negate the will but the will is just as manifest in you know the behavior of animals as well but um human beings possess greater knowledge um and so he writes how knowledge creates greater suffering um he he does he does say that knowledge in and of itself is painless but what it knowledge brings us is the ability to illumine the character of the will and so schopenhauer writes quote will is the string its frustration or impediment

the vibration of the string knowledge the sounding board and pain the sound in quote so pain increases with the awareness created by knowledge he says that knowledge also increases our capacity for pleasure but only by little compared with how much more suffering we now um are able to be aware of you might say to comprehend and after all this heightened capacity for suffering for the kinds of suffering that only a being like us a human being the brain with complex desires and goals and a self-image the kind of suffering that only we can have this

is a type of sublime more complex suffering that is what gives us this push to seek for an end to this world of willing the highest gradation of the will mankind has the most pronounced suffering but man's knowledge also exists at precisely the gradation at which there exists the possibility of the denial of the will and so he writes and this is in that same section of the essay section seven quote at each higher stage of animal life there is a corresponding increase in pain and the lowest animals is extremely slight but even in the

highest it nowhere approaches the pain which man is capable of feeling since even the highest animals lack thought in concepts and it is right that this capacity for pain should reach its zenith only where by virtue of the existence of reason there also exists the possibility of denial of the will for otherwise it would be nothing but aimless cruelty end quote and so there's this promise the ability to deny the will here uh he quotes a saying from ecclesiastes um this is in uh world his will and representation actually but he that increases knowledge increase

increaseth sorrow um and that's from ecclesiastes so uh he says that even in the in the plant we can recognize a ceaseless restless striving we can see that you know he thinks that's sort of represented so to speak and how the the growth of even things like plants but because plants have no sentience they have no pain at least in the way that we would think of pain the sentience gained by higher objectifications of the will enhances pain and one way it does this is by increasing finitude we might say so even though we exist

in limitless time and space um under schopenhauer's ontology the human being finds himself to be finite projected into this individual lifetime and every life is always sliding towards death at every moment all individuated existences considered from the ultimate perspective a constant continuous dying he writes you know constant push of all things into death and the human being is the most aware of this out of any of the individuated phenomena and we're among the most individuated right because a man each man constitutes his own special platonic form in schopenhauer's view and so we need the intellect

to have true pain that a human being is capable the result of this however is that man becomes able to conceive of the denial of the will and he actually sees that it's reasonable to deny the will and so schopenhauer writes this is in book 4 section 56 quote for this reason we wish to consider in human existence the inner and essential destiny of the will everyone will readily find the same thing once more in the life of the animal only more feebly expressed in various degrees he can also sufficiently convince himself in the suffering

animal world how essentially all life is suffering end quote so our greater knowledge the will is just blindly striving on normally but with the gradation of human beings of the will um we gain this insight into suffering and the more clear and precise our resolution to the nature of the world the more we become aware of this inevitable fact and so we ask how can we end that suffering human beings are the first being that's capable of asking that question and schopenhauer's answer to it is the negation of the will and the idea that this

might be a kind of salvation for mankind what's interesting to me here is that schopenhauer has effectively provided an atheistic argument that still makes the existence of a person's life meaningful in a teleological sense as in your life is or can be lived for a purpose it isn't just over when you die so who cares um and because as he writes the will will continue to go on its blind striving causing all this pain unless human beings take it upon themselves as a moral duty to stop striving stop willing to exist and this the kind

of salvation offered cannot be mentioned uh without raising a comparison to buddhism here there's the idea of the arahant as they say and the their avada tradition which is another word for uh what we might call a saint um it's not really a good translation but it's the closest thing we can probably get in english or you know the in the mahayana tradition they would talk about an enlightened buddha um you know that's by the time of the mahayana there's a lot of buddhas schopenhauer was of course uh you know he was influenced by this

religious ideal coming from the east of an individual through correct action and through a whole course of mental and moral training the the idea that an individual could stop their craving stop desiring stop willing and that by that token you gain an exit to the world of incarnation and suffering and in buddhism for example the stakes are very clear human life is incredibly valuable because being born as a human on the great wheel of becoming is said to be very rare you could be born as an animal or a ghost or as one of the

sufferers in hell or as a deva or an asura but only humans have the ability to train and reach enlightenment and so schopenhauer's idea of the person using reason to stop desiring and thus to deny the will to exist is a perfect parallel to the buddhist idea of enlightenment becoming free of tana which is thirsting or or craving um by letting go of all desires the buddhist is you know the the dot the buddhist doctrine is you'll be able to stop incarnating into all these cycles becoming which in buddhism is called samsara and then you

have the enlightenment aspect as well in buddhism the idea of achieving nirvana which you could translate as the extinguishment of all desire all clinging and the argument in buddhism is that that clinging that desiring that's it's the clinging to becoming that keeps you being reborn into becoming within this dependent existence um and so the parallels are very clear the influence is very clear um on uh schopenhauer ethically that he is um putting buddhism into a western philosophical system schopenhauer outlines in book three the means of achieving or a means of achieving liberation from the the

blind striving nature of the will but he uses means which are not aesthetic but aesthetic for schopenhauer the direct exit from the will exists in art creation of art contemplation of art um schopenhauer has a very unique interpretation of what art is and what the aesthetic experiences and what the value of aesthetics are it's actually one i very much disagree with um but it's so it's a view that influenced nietzsche though very greatly um and nietzsche criticized this view too but he um when we get on to talking about nietzsche's aesthetics um in many ways

you could see it as a modification or transformation a critical update on schopenhauer's work you might say but um schopenhauer's views on art unifies several threads of schopenhauer's thought that we laid out in the in the last episode they all kind of weave together um when he's considering art and aesthetics in book three so there's the problem of the wills eternal striving and the suffering this causes there is the need of finding some means of denying the will in order to gain liberation from that suffering there's the discussion of the platonic forums or the platonic

ideals that we we brought into it and how they fit into this whole um this whole philosophy and finally the question of what practical form this philosophy will take that incorporates all these elements and all of these threads are woven together in schopenhauer's view on art uh schopenhauer writes in section 49 quote the object of art the depiction of which is the aim of the artist and the knowledge of which must consequently precede his work as its german source is an idea in plato's sense and absolutely nothing else not the particular thing the object of

common comprehension and not the concept the object of rational thought and of science end quote that's from actually near the end of book three but it sums up the overall view he gives of art that the platonic idea is what is being depicted and contemplated in art and that the contemplation of the platonic idea is in itself the liberation from the suffering caused by the will so now i guess i'll have to outlay the argument as to how he gets there because it requires some explanation so he begins book three with a uh recapitulation to

the idea that he has you know discovered this agreement between plato and kant and how even though people have pointed out the differences between the philosophies of plato and kant or frame their philosophical ideas in different ways i mean they both talked about them in a very different language ultimately schopenhauer believes that both men pointed to the same fundamental truth which is discoverable by reason and that plato's ideas identify something which is not strictly phenomena nor thing in itself that is to say the wills gradations the different patterns and levels at which the will objectifies

itself which schopenhauer calls the forms he says they are not the thing in itself but they're a unique category of representation which are not subject to the laws of you know impermanence and plurality like all other phenomena would be so to explain what this means we'll defer to schopenhauer book 3 section 32 quote the platonic idea is necessarily object something known a representation and precisely but only in this respect is it different from the thing in itself it has laid aside merely the subordinate forms of the phenomenon and all of which we include under the

principle of sufficient reason or rather it has not yet entered into them but it has retained the first and most universal form namely that of the representation in general that of being object for a subject it is the form subordinate to this the general expression of which is the principle of sufficient reason which multiply the idea in particular in fleeting individuals whose number in respect to the idea is a matter of complete indifference end quote then uh skipping down a little bit in the passage before continuing quote between it and the thing in itself the

idea still stands as the only direct objectivity of the will since it has not assumed any other form peculiar to knowledge as such except that of the representation in general i.e that of being object for a subject therefore it alone is the most adequate objectivity possible of the will or of the thing in itself indeed it is even the whole thing in itself only under the form of representation here lies the ground of the agreement between plato and kant although in strict accuracy that of which they both speak is not the same end quote so

as schopenhauer said in the past episode or as we talked about schopenhauer saying in the past episode the gradations of the will's objectification which he considers to be the same as platonic forms are natural laws and forces in organic matter plants animals finally mankind each individual person stands for his own special individualized platonic idea and so each phenomenon is a particular pattern within the material world that the will can take the platonic form you might consider a blueprint for all of the individual phenomena that exist so to put this into words that a secularist or

a materialist can understand because there's the obvious objection right that the idea of a platonic form the reason why many of us modern people reject that idea is because it's not obvious how that works in practical reality right why it also suggests a sort of teleology for um organisms and natural phenomena that um it may seem unjustified to claim but let's let's put it into different language in the case of biological evolution we have examples in the fossil record and in so far from what we know of mapping you know the genome of the animal

kingdom that certain types of animals um independently evolve into the same forms you might remember there were some pop science articles recently about how um a lot of species just end up evolving into crabs um this is so this there's actually a name for this it's called carsonization uh it's an evolutionary pattern followed over and over again by crustaceans um a species mutates from a non-crab-like form into a crab-like form you know obviously over many many generations but it happens over and over again this is a phenomenon known as convergent evolution there are other examples

of it but let's think about what the phenomenon of convergent evolution implies we know that certain material forms and certain genetic combinations from this example um you know what you might call a certain biological pattern is selected for by the process of natural selection what's ultimately selected for is survivability from a darwinian perspective or if you believe in you know nietzsche and evolution what's selected for is power from my perspective you could regardless to terms as largely referring to the same thing but in any case certain patterns are more survivable than others and we know

from convergent evolution that it isn't totally random and senseless and that what patterns survive is it's not totally based on chance we know that the environment will sometimes produce the same patterns uh meaning that multiple organisms with different genomes move towards that same pattern another way of saying this is that certain patterns are implied by the physical conditions which means certain patterns are implied by reality reality itself in a blind unconscious process produces situations into which certain patterns emerge to fulfill those situations so the pressures on crustaceans tend to push them toward the pattern or

what we might call the platonic idea of the crab carsonization is crustaceans realizing the platonic form of of the crab that is the ideal crustacean um and so to schopenhauer the platonic form is even more real than the individual example of the species again using the platonic idea here referring to platonic ideas of different animals and this is because the individuals come and go but this has no bearing on the pattern as we see in the example of carsonization even the whole species sometimes goes but the pattern still calls the objects of the world into

that same form the pattern exists independently of whether the individuals survive or not we could extrapolate this to mean that every single phenomenon which comes into being does so in response to the conditions set by materiality producing this possibility for it to exist to speak metaphysically that's reality willing something to exist and the most real form of phenomenal existence is as the possibility itself rather than the individual phenomena as we said the pattern to use an example from astronomy individual stars exist but stars are born and eventually stars die um art and so now our

modern materialist thinking says that the world is a world of objects and that the stars the actual individual stars those are the real phenomena right schopenhauer's opposite perspective to this might be akin to saying no the real phenomenon is the process of star formation itself the conditions that produce stars um you know no matter what once once those conditions come into alignment you will get stars that is what is real and that is what we can represent with the math behind star formation what you might call the discovery of a pattern in in nature itself

and the schopenhauer argument might be to liken the math behind star formation to a platonic idea of a star it's not the math itself of course the math is just another series of symbols of representation within a language we've all invented together as humans but it's the actual physical processes to which the math refers the conditions of reality that don't just produce that's too weak of a word the conditions that necessitate that there are stars the pattern emerges to fill that void to fill the need or the will of reality and so this is the

relationship between the platonic ideas and what we class as like an ordinary representation the other representations are subject to the principle of sufficient reason as schopenhauer calls it um you know subject and object causality time space and so on the platonic ideas are not subject to this in the same way they only exist within that world of subject and object because they're still as he says in that quote we read there's still things that we're it's our way of representing the thing in itself to ourselves so it's still a representation but in the platonic ideas

we can behold objectification itself the object itself and that that's it's in contemplating the idea of something the pattern of something that we can regard a phenomena or a representation that does not stir the will within us the patterns themselves are the most directly known objects but they're not objects of the will speaking here of our individualized peculiar goals and desires a man doesn't desire the pattern of a woman you know the platonic idea of a woman necessitated by the evolutionary and biological reality of you know having a species of the male and female sex

manifest in human beings which exists beyond any individual woman no a you know a straight man desires the individual woman not the pattern and it's not the pattern itself that can injure you or that you can suffer from from a want of since we suffer from external stimuli the external suffering can only come to us from objects that exist within the principle of sufficient reason you know individuated things and beings that we come into contact with in this world of you know struggles between the will the platonic idea the pattern itself does not partake in

reality in that same way and so this is schopenhauer's entry point for the liberation from our enslavement to our desires and that liberation comes from within artistic contemplation he describes the basis of this process in section 34 where he says that quote knowledge tears itself free from the service of the will precisely by the subjects ceasing to be merely individual and being now a pure willless subject of knowledge end quote um so this is the role of knowledge in negating the will knowledge evolved in service of the will we gained our knowledge in order to

perpetuate the will to exist and its cravings but by using this knowledge we can undermine the very thing that brought it into being and he elaborates a little further down in that same passage quote raised up by the power of the mind we relinquish the ordinary way of considering things and cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason merely their relations to one another whose final goal is always the relation to our own will thus we no longer consider the where the when the why and the wither in

things but simply and solely the what further we do not let abstract thought the concepts of reason take possession of our consciousness but instead of all this devote the whole power of the mind to perception sync ourselves completely therein and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present whether it be a landscape a tree a rock a crag a building or anything else we lose ourselves entirely in this object to use a pregnant expression in other words we forget our individuality our will and continue to exist only

as pure subject a clear mirror of the object so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception but the two have become one since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception end quote i have a lot to say about this passage for one this kind of this idea of disinterested contemplation works with both the eastern idea of meditation and at least some dimension of what we mean by the appreciation of

art in the west but i think that schopenhauer is therefore narrowing a definition of art in a sense to exclude some things that other people might consider as art such that at the very least we could just say his idea of a truly aesthetic experience or of truly aesthetic creativity would involve only the art which is done from that place of selfless perception and contemplation of the object and speaking as an artist myself that is not my experience with art but i do think the view of art he's outlining here is contained within nietzsche's later

idea of the apollonian and i think that's why he had to invent the dionysian as a counter balance because nietzsche believed that this view of art did not contain the whole of the artistic experience you know there's something orgy astic and indulgent about the musical or revelations of art for example but schopenhauer's conception of art applies i think more mostly to the visual arts to drama to poetry sculpture painting architecture things of that nature plastic arts language arts visual arts but let's set that aside for a moment suppose that um you know whatever we want

to say about art and the aesthetic experience overall because i know that'll be a contentious topic schopenhauer is pointing to some real phenomenon that can be achieved by art just as it could be achieved by eastern meditation and to be honest you know you could interpret the passage above or the one i just read in the most general terms to be a form of meditation that he's describing most meditative activities involve fixing the mind on a single discernible object on which the awareness is totally focused and so even though thoughts usually arise the meditator has

to simply let them pass and not attach to them and instead continually return his focus to the object of meditation um which is what schopenhauer advises he says not to we're not getting we're not going to entertain conceptual thoughts um an accommodates experience that meditators report when doing a mantra meditation where they repeat the same mantra over and over again is that eventually the words lose all meaning and one can have a sense of losing oneself as jopenhauer puts it here losing the the subject object distinction he uses the metaphor of being a clear mirror

that simply reflects the perception of the object funnily enough this is like the same metaphor used in the famous zen buddhist story of the poetry contest between shenhue and huinong huinong's favor famous poem in that story he uses the metaphor of the mind as a mirror quote the mind is the bodhi tree the body is the bright mirror stand the bright mirror is originally clean and pure where could there be any dust end quote and so um in that poem you know they uh the body the thing that perceives the sense information right all comes

through the sense organs of the body it's it's just a uh it's a the body is the bright mirror stand but the the mirror is originally clean and pure um and dust you know in in the buddhist tradition uh when they talk about dust that's like your uh your attachment or clinging that comes in through the senses schopenhauer goes on in the the passage we were just talking about to quote from uh byron who wrote quote are not the mountains waves and skies a part of me and of my soul as i of them end

quote which is also interesting because you you hear that same kind of language in a lot of zen buddhist stories but schopenhauer writes of these lines by byron that quote whoever has in the manner stated becomes so absorbed and lost in the perception of nature that he exists only as a purely knowing subject becomes in this way immediately aware that as such he is the condition and hence the supporter of the world and of all objective existence for this now shows itself as dependent on his existence he therefore draws nature into himself so that he

feels it to be only an accident of his own being end quote so through the absorption into pure perception one can lose themselves as the subject and momentarily become willless he likens this state of mind to the one most highly prized by epicurus he believes this is a state possible for the enlightened philosopher here using the term enlightened quite differently from the buddhist sense although i'm sure that both concepts probably swam around in schopenhauer's mind um this is in section 38 quote it is the state where simultaneously and inseparably the perceived individual thing is raised

to the idea of its species and the knowing individual to the pure subject of willis knowing and now the two as such no longer stand in the stream of time and of all other relations end quote so schopenhauer believe that this state is possible through art or perhaps through we might extend that to aesthetic practice in eastern meditation and as a result when you begin to look at the world and that means a perception the world becomes this this fleeting dreamlike existence and just to bring it back to why somebody might want to achieve this

state that he's describing we're the only thing we're the world only representation as he says in the um uh second book we're at only representation and nothing besides it would simply pass us by and we wouldn't even notice it you know but it's our will that fills the world and all the objects of the world with meaning and causes all of our striving and suffering it's not the platonic idea of an object that makes you suffer as we said and so you focus on that the pure representation rather than on the individual targets and desires

of your will which will only continue you suffering because you know your pursuit of the will's desires only ever leads to suffering so show open hour continues in section 38 quote all willing springs from lack from deficiency and thus from suffering fulfillment brings this to an end yet for one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least 10 that are denied further desiring lasts a long time demands and requests go on to infinity fulfillment is short and meted out sparingly but even the final satisfaction itself is only apparent the wish fulfilled at once makes its

way for a new one the former is a known delusion the latter a delusion not as yet known no attained object of willing can give a satisfaction that lasts and no longer declines but it is always like the alms thrown to a beggar which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow end quote so that was just to recap again that desires do lead to suffering invariably and without fail the will always leads to suffering so the results of following any course of action is ultimately disappointment um you know further down

in the passage he compares mankind to one lying on the revolving wheel of ixion or to the eternally thirsting tantalus both examples from greek mythology and this is apropos of the buddhist outlook wherein as the you know dwellers in samsara our lives are at least somewhat hellish uh you know um and we've all been incarnated into hell in the past in buddhist cosmology and likely will again in the future schopenhauer really does mean that our striving in this world is akin to being like sisyphus in the here and now pushing a heavy boulder uphill to

no point and no purpose completely in vain and prolonging his own suffering the harder he strives and so after learning um all this about schopenhauer um it may surprise you to know his uh favorite style of art were the dutch realist painters um schopenhauer writes they were the type of artists who brought forth um this opportunity for negating the will and becoming the pure willless subject that they they perfected this this is also from section 38 quote inward disposition predominance of knowing over willing can bring about this state in any environment this is shown by

those admirable dutchmen who directed such purely objective perception to the most insignificant objects and set up a lasting monument of their objectivity and spiritual peace and paintings of still life the aesthetic beholder does not contemplate this without emotions for it graphically describes to him the calm tranquil will-free frame of mind of which the artist which was necessary for contemplating such insignificant things so objectively considering them so attentively and repeating this perception with such thought since the picture invites the beholder to participate in this state his emotion is often enhanced by the contrast between it and

his own restless state of mind disturbed by vehement willing in which he happens to be in the same spirit landscape painters especially roosdale have often painted extremely insignificant landscape objects and have thus produced the same effect even more delightfully end quote and so it's almost as if he's trying to describe the most boring type of art possible now i'm not knocking still life paintings nor am i knocking a landscape painting of an insignificant landscape as he put puts it i like paintings of simple and small things but something about the way he describes it is

just so so contrary to what i find intriguing about art it's like he thinks the relevant thing about a piece of art is whether one can get into the the the mind state of the kind of care and attention to something so neutral and insignificant and so art for schopenhauer is about becoming that mirror where you are completely reflecting the objectivity of something um so i think that would be the most generous way to put it maybe some artists out there will maybe understand that um but in any case as a meditative exercise as a

very specific way to engage with art i think it's worth considering and so in any case this is where schopenhauer brings in the concept of genius genius of course shares an etymological root with the word genie in english or that's gin and arabic and so we use the term genius for someone who has breakthrough insights that seemingly come out of nowhere just like the power of the genie seemingly comes out of nowhere and works as if by magic in schopenhauer's conception of genius the genius is the person who's capable of comprehending the ideas the platonic

ideas independently of the individual entities of that idea the genius is the ability for representing the idea itself without the plurality and the impermanence and strife caused by being subject to the principle of sufficient reason like all the individuated phenomena phenomena of an idea are unless the person with genius is capable of becoming this pure will-less subject of knowing and so the degree to which genius uh you know is in it geniuses and the common parlance has perceived to come from outside the subject you know someone has a lightbulb moment where does it come from

um this this folk wisdom is because genius is um it's experience it's experienced as something um it's experiences like pure pure knowing in the moment of genius and you don't know where it come from came from schopenhauer's explanation of for this is that you know the true genius is empty of their own individuated will and their moment of genius and that's he also says this is why madness and the arts are always correlated and in schopenhauer's explanation it's because quote the impression of the present moment on them is very strong and carries them away into

thoughtless actions into emotion and passion end quote that's from section 36 where he likens the madness of the artistic or philosophical genius to plato's enlightened man who has freed himself from the cave quote those who outside the cave have seen true sunlight and the things that actually are the ideas cannot afterwards see within the cave anymore because their eyes have grown unaccustomed to the darkness they no longer recognize the shadow forms correctly they are therefore ridiculed for their mistakes by those others who have never left the cave in those shadow forms end quote so this

is the role of the artist um not although you know the term genius could be applied to anyone capable of purely absorbing themselves in the activity of the mind without their individual will becoming involved i think you know schopenhauer has very peculiar views on art and some unusual definitions to say the least but where it's most useful is in how the idea of will-less contemplation figures into his philosophy and that is as an activity of religious importance we might say or metaphysical importance and such an encounter with aesthetic beauty that completely enraptures you in will-less

contemplation is what schopenhauer calls the sublime such an object of aesthetic contemplation that can put you into this state is itself sublime he says thus we have a definition of beauty that comes along with schopenhauer's aesthetics which he finds in the sublime and he can therefore hold up as the teleological end of all artistic activity schopenhauer's theory of aesthetics also includes natural beauty as well as man-made and he writes extensively about how the natural world can call you into the world of the sublime and he writes in section 39 quote let us transport ourselves to

a very very lonely region of boundless horizons under a perfectly cloudless sky trees and plants and the perfectly motionless air no animals no human beings no moving masses of water the profoundest silence such surroundings are as it were a summons to seriousness to contemplation with complete emancipation from all willing and its cravings but it is just this that gives to such a scene of mere solitude and profound peace a touch of the sublime end quote this is why schopenhauer is sometimes classed as a romantic romanticism is one of those funny words because it means a

bunch of different things some of which are contradictory but i think this because we usually judge romanticism by the resultant um attitude created by a given philosophy so like the result right the effect rather than the cause so less on the rigorous analysis of a given philosophy's tenets schopenhauer produced a philosophy in which the immersion in nature is synonymous with finding peace and absorption into pure contemplation of the object and so he's by that token romantic because he's literally saying the way to salvation from the striving and strife of the world is through the feelings

that nature stirs in us so uh schopenhauer has of course been called by far scarier names than that of a romantic though he's been called the the great pessimist um and i want to get into why one of the most pessimistic aspects of schopenhauer's philosophy it's one that sets him apart um unlike some pessimists such as lugodi or siran or david benitar schopenhauer does not see man's mortality as the central depressing fact of his existence because schopenhauer is in some sense actually darker than that for schopenhauer if death was merely the end of our existence

that would be a form of salvation from the endless suffering of the world in and of itself right but schopenhauer doesn't believe that we escape the samsara of willing merely through dying i'm not trying to trivialize those other pessimists by the way um you know the horror and pain in shiran for example his work is a very poetic attempt to confront the void at the end of consciousness um you know for lugodi the knowledge of time and our mortality is again the central problem for schopenhauer however the problem uh does not end with the death

of any individual phenomenon of the will our concern with the problem doesn't even end with our own death for schopenhauer the problem is not death the problem is life life is suffering the world is the will to live in its various incarnate forms an endless push to continue to exist in whatever state you're in every individual pattern in its its little states um forever willing and never having satisfaction and never succeeding and and into this cycle of suffering is exactly what schopenhauer thinks we must find through philosophy and aesthetics and ascetic practice which means he's

locked up again with the buddhists here who don't believe there is an easy way out of samsara by dying um because of the doctrine of rebirth um and i have so much to say on this that i can't elaborate further without derailing the episode but i'll just say it's very telling that the western um secular buddhists that we have here in america when they convert they don't typically want to accept the idea of rebirth when they convert to buddhism even though rebirth is more or less a universal in the beliefs of buddhists all over the

world and yet here you know american buddhists are always quick to tell you it's something you don't quote have to believe and of course we don't want to believe that because american buddhists are looking for you know they're looking for a way out of their suffering and re-characterizing existence itself is this truly inescapable suffering i think would be too demoralizing but um but so schopenhauer begins uh book four by addressing mortality and he points out how our concern with mortality has driven mankind in every civilization to adopt complex sometimes costly rituals and representations associated with

death he uh particularly praises the hindu conception of the godheads trinity which includes brahma who symbolizes a generation vishnu who symbolizes preservation and shiva who symbolizes destruction you know appearing as he does with the necklace of skulls and the lingam but he also notes the costly roman sarcophagi uh we could also uh include all the holidays of death that we talked about in the halloween episode we did recently but so schopenhauer writes in section 54 quote the form of this phenomenon is time space and causality and through these individuation which requires that the individual must

come into being and pass away but this no more disturbs the will to live the individual being only a particular example or specimen so to speak of this phenomenon of will then does the death of an individual injure the whole of nature for it is not the individual that nature cares for but only the species and in all seriousness she urges the preservation of the species since she provides so lavishly through the immense surplus of the seed and the great strength of the fructifying impulse the individual on the contrary has no value to nature and

can have none for finite time infinite space and the infinite number of possible individuals therein are her kingdom therefore nature is always ready to let the individual fall the individual is accordingly not only exposed to destruction in a thousand ways from the most insignificant accidents but is even destined for this and is led towards it by nature herself from the moment that individual has served the maintenance of the species in this way nature quite openly expresses the great truth that only ideas not individuals have reality proper in other words are a complete objectivity of the

will end quote um so schopenhauer mentioned shiva as i said before but this depiction of nature using you know female pronouns for nature as he does throughout the passage we just quoted uh it reminds me a great deal of kali shiva's a wife or really any depictions of the monstrous feminine or you know the many under world goddesses of ancient times schopenhauer's basically hammering home that is individuals living as part of this phenomenal world um we're subject to these laws of causality and individuation and thus mortality we're not like the platonic ideas and that means

they're more real than we ever can be um even though individual human beings have their own special archetype but that archetype that pattern of you in theory is even more real than you are as a willing subject because the willing subject that exists as an individual thing um you know strives after other objectified individual things in the world and that thing will die and that's unavoidable um but here we have to remember these two worlds that schopenhauer is standing in because on the one hand all being is indivisible and eternally indestructible and on the other

hand being exists as all these uh individual things that are constantly being recycled part of his argument um you know as to how you can deny the will to live is to part of what you're doing is recognizing that eternal indestructibility of being and reflecting it you know simply like a mirror um and so schopenhauer he goes on to argue that it's irrational to fear death because it's only if one fully embraces life and is satisfied with life as it is that you can fear for the end of life but uh schopenhauer thinks that's a

delusional attitude and he thinks it's one that your life will eventually uh disabuse you of that would be the short argument but he writes in section 54 um there of man's paradoxical attitude towards death which i find very fascinating quote everything is entirely in nature and she is entirely in everything she has her center and every animal the animal has certainly found its way into existence just as it will certainly find its way out of it meanwhile it lives fearlessly and heedlessly in the presence of annihilation supported by the consciousness that it is nature herself

and is it as imperishable as she man alone carries with him and abstract concepts the certainty of his own death yet this can frighten him only very rarely and at particular moments when some occasion calls it up to the imagination against the mighty voice of nature reflection can do little and man as in the animal that does not think there prevails a lasting state of mind that certainty springing from innermost consciousness that he is nature the world itself by virtue of this no one is noticeably disturbed by the thought of certain and never distant death

but everyone lives on as though he is bound to live forever end quote and so that's uh curious to me it's it's very intuitive to me in some sense and yet it flies in the face of the common wisdom that the fear of death is this universal and pervasive influential force in the human psyche schopenhauer suggests here that we don't in common practice find ourselves bothered by death that the nature of existence is essentially for the individual will to focus its attention just on its immediate goals and desires and go on striving that way as

though it was going to continue forever and his explanation for this is that deep down we have an immediate knowledge that we're all part and parcel with the will and nothing is really going to end when we go into death our conceptual and religious frameworks for dealing with death are these mere abstract concepts it's a way to put those thoughts off in a box so we can continue laboring in the service of the will the individual phenomena dies but you know it was an unreal dream like phantasm anyway and you know many religions have these

this idea that in death you're returning to this primordial unity um you know or in modern christianity returning to your communion with god however you want to put it um it becomes a little difficult at this point to explain what schopenhauer thinks happens after death and on some level you might ask uh you know what is he an expert how is it why is he speaking about this but except to say he thinks of things basically i guess following his epistemology through to its logical conclusions he thinks that um speaking of things happening quote unquote

after death is like a category confusion almost um so we exist temporally while we're representing the world right because time is a uh a function or an aspect of the world is representation but he believes that what you know if we're talking about time when the representation stops um by definition all we are is the thing in itself we would return to the thing in itself which continues on in its blind's driving and yet he quotes the vedas here um in his footnotes a section where it apparently says that when a man dies his various

sense faculties become one with the various things of the world his visual faculty becomes one with the sun uh his sense of smell with the earth his hearing with the air his speech with fire and so on uh this is not supposed to be taken literally but schopenhauer sees a lot of you know these ancient writings as prefiguring uh more sophisticated logical insights that would come later so he holds to plato's idea that learning is remembering that we can we we recall these eternal insights into the nature of things perhaps through genius you might say

and so men throughout time have had the insight that death is not quote unquote the end but it's difficult to express because by exiting our consciousness and not representing the world anymore you know you don't go somewhere else after death we cease to exist as separate things in space and time but go on as part of the indestructible chain of beings so perhaps there's not really like a language to talk about this but so he writes in section 54 quote for it is true that everyone is transitory only as phenomenon but on the other hand

as thing in itself he is timeless and so endless but also only as phenomenon is the individual different from the other things of the world as thing in itself he is the will that appears in everything and death does away with the illusion that separates his consciousness from that of the rest this is future existence or immortality end quote so it's on this account that schopenhauer doesn't think that we might find a solution to the problem of life through say suicide life is the character of the will to live it will go on living it

doesn't matter to the will what fleeting dreamlike forms you know decide to end themselves whether they live or pass away none of that has any bearing on the world as well um he in his essay the indestructibility of being uh schopenhauer clarifies little that he doesn't believe in rebirth in the sense of one soul going on into new incarnations he takes some view which i would call a little bit more authentically buddhist than that actually which he classifies as palin genesis and he writes his quote the decomposition and reconstruction of the individual in which will

alone persists and assuming the shape of a new being receives a new intellect end quote so that's very similar again to the buddhist picture of samsara and the way that works is uh cheetah the mind stream or you know the particular vector you might say of one's will or desire or ego continually takes on new shapes in accord with its past karma um so long as that karma is not exhausted so it's not it's not reincarnation in the sense that your soul dies and then like you or your individuality some kind of like individual soul

trans migrates from thing to thing uh it's on a more fundamental level than that um uh how would i put it without getting too new ag the best way to say it schopenhauer really does believe you contain the whole universe and the whole universe is you and um the part that's not new agey is that it's a suffered you know suffering tortured universe and um ending the one individual life well not in its suffering but you know again as he says above that the distinctions between you and everything else are an illusion um and so

again this is kind of almost beyond language to talk about but and so schopenhauer distinguishes the evils of death and pain from one another you know death is the fear of the termination of one's individual existence um and so the individual you know it's in its nature to as the will to live it struggles with all its might against death but um but for schopenhauer he thinks we can dispel that kind of fear through reason by understanding the true substance of the world you know that which we are that true substance cannot die our individual

existence is this an illusion that will dissolve one day but that won't kill you in any real sense so for schopenhauer the real evil between the two that he distinguishes is pain the real problem to deal with is not death but the fact that life goes on endlessly and life is endless pain and so he concludes these considerations in section 54 laying this out clearly for us by way of example quote a man who had assimilated firmly into his way of thinking the truth so far advanced but at the same time had not come to

know through his own experience or through a deeper insight that constant suffering is essential to all life who found satisfaction in life and took perfect delight in it who desired in spite of calm deliberation that the course of his life as he had hitherto experienced it should be of endless duration or of constant recurrence and whose courage to face life was so great that in return for life's pleasures he would willingly and gladly put up with all the hardships and miseries to which it is subject such a man would stand quote with firm strong bones

in the well-grounded enduring earth and would have nothing to fear armed with the knowledge we confer on him he would look with indifference at death hastening toward him on the wings of time he would consider it as a false illusion an impotent specter frightening to the weak but having no power over him who knows that he himself is that will of which the whole world is the objectification or copy to which therefore life and also the present always remain certain and sure end quote so i know i said we're saving nietzsche's interpretations and you know

modifications of schopenhauer for future episodes but um you know hearing that i mean that should ring some bells for you right um the idea of somebody wishing for constant recurrence of their life the thought of death is well that's frightening to the weak but not someone certain of their ever enduring life in existence and the fact that they are really the will this to me almost reads like a challenge that nietzsche accepted schopenhauer is setting up this type of person um now for schopenhauer's purposes he's setting this up as the preliminary stage in an argument

in which he goes on to argue that life is um irredeemable by any pleasures that occur within it because the evil isn't death it's pain and schopenhauer is only using this example of such a person um just simply to say uh to point out that their it's their lack of understanding of the cruel pointless nature of life that would make them take such a position um such a person as he describes them would be entirely correct about the nature of the world being solely will and this indestructible primal being death is of no consequence but

to schopenhauer they would simply be wrong about life it is life and the will to live which must be rejected denied and negated um and so if we accept schopenhauer's picture of the world then nietzsche's disagreement with him would not be about the facts on the ground so to speak it's that nietzsche is willing to um say yes to that life that schopenhauer just outlined he's he's willing to posit that eternal recurrence as a positive thing and so he does not wish to negate the will and negate the world as schopenhauer does and we'll elaborate

that on that in the following episodes but schopenhauer believes that such a viewpoint is not reasonable and the strongest argument he has for that is the argument that simply put pleasure is not happiness or at least it's not sufficient for happiness to schopenhauer um happiness can only be meaningfully defined as the absence of what we would call suffering not just physical pain but suffering in the sense of mental anguish again remember only humans truly can suffer in the sense that we would understand suffering the absence of this suffering is happiness as he defines it pleasure

has nothing to do with it in actual fact pursuing pleasures um is necessarily detrimental to happiness and schopenhauer's view that's essential to what the problem is right and so he writes in 58 and i'm quoting here in an abridged forum where i'll be skipping down through a couple sections he writes quote all satisfaction or what is commonly called happiness is really and essentially always negative only and never positive for desire that is to say want is the precedent condition of every pleasure and so the satisfaction or gratification can never be more than deliverance from a

pain or a want such is not only every actual and evident suffering but also every desire whose importunity disturbs our peace and indeed even the deadening boredom that makes existence a burden to us the want the probation the suffering is what is positive and proclaims itself immediately end quote and what we have here is uh it's fascinating to me because it's so platonic in a sense while also being very anti-platonic in another sense it's a rejection of the concept of the good life because life is by definition not good and yet chopin howard does have

a sort of eudaimonia he's pointing to here it's just that it's achieved by the negation of the individual will and the voluntary abandonment of the pursuits of life ain't life life sames because there's nothing to be gained if happiness is negative and merely the absence of suffering and and suffering is actually what it is that asserts itself you know it asserts itself repeatedly through the movement of the endlessly striving will then the moral and reasonable thing to do in that case is to act negatively to deny oneself their endless chasing after their own desires um

and so schopenhauer's other prescriptions other than the contemplation of art and asceticism are quiet contemplation living simply and you know following your desires as little as possible and so walking out of plato's cave involves this rejection of the world as a mere illusion a life lived for knowledge and knowing as a thing detached from life and the will and so what then is the aim of schopenhauer's metaphysics and morality where does it all lead where does one's life lead if lived not for any goal or object of one's will if one's only desire is to

negate desire to negate suffering negate the will um the will of course being the world so what is left then and schaubenhauer's answer is nothing schopenhauer's aim is the equivalent of the buddhist concept of prajnaparamita the perfection of wisdom which is it's the negation of the subject object dualism by definition the state of being is impossible for us to fully encompass in language as beings trapped within these individuated willing existences as we already said but schopenhauer even rejects the conceptual frame works that he discovered in the in the east and that inspired him so much

at the very end of the work he writes in section 71 quote that we abhor nothingness so much is simply another way of saying that we will life so much and that we are nothing but this will and know nothing but it alone end quote when this denial of will is achieved in the tradition of the saints of every religion we step aside from this restless pressure and effort and stop partaking in the constant transition from desire to apprehension from joy to sorrow we contemplate the forms of the world but do not invest them with

substance which is a process done by our desires and so schopenhauer continues quote we have to banish that dark impression of nothingness which has the final goal hovers behind all virtue and holiness and which we fear as children fear darkness we must not even evade it as the indians do by myths and meaningless words such as reabsorption in brahman or the nirvana of the buddhists on the contrary we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is for all who are still full of the will assuredly nothing but also conversely to

those in whom the will has turned and denied itself this very real world of ours with all its sons and galaxies is nothing end quote sometimes scholars in the west have translated nirvana as extinction perhaps a more proper term is a extinguishment i've heard some figures such as peacock and and bachelor criticize these translations and you know uh critique the fact that the west was introduced to eastern religion through the pessimism of schopenhauer but i think it's fair to say that chopin however here even you know he he's distinguishing himself from his eastern influences and

that he's willing to be um you know i wouldn't say more pessimistic but he's he by by not he's saying we shouldn't even have a linguistic term for this state of being because that just gives people the impression it's our way of hiding from the fact of looking at uh looking honestly at the fact that the salvation is the void that's what he says like hovers behind all attempts of holiness and virtue is the promise of nothingness um and you know psychologically you could have a field day wondering about whether that's actually true or says

more about jopenhower than everyone else but um you know no no likening of the state of one in nirvana to some kind of continued existence no no no uh mystifying of the fact of the state of being that we're aiming towards um full acceptance that rejection of the world means true nothingness so true death for schopenhauer isn't something achieved through suicide he calls suicide vain in a useless gesture because the will will continue incarnating and you'll still be part of that true death is found in the conscious rational rejection of life as a sort of

autonomous choice of the willing subject true nothingness is achieved as an act of the intellect an act of pure knowledge pure perception um and thus even though you know he writes elsewhere that it would have been better if there were no existence at all as with the quote that we started the episode with his attitude is ultimately more nuanced than that and that um the world as he sees it the way it actually is um human life is the opportunity to find freedom and that's as a consequence of humanity reaching this point of being able

to represent the suffering of the world fully and freedom from that world is synonymous with nothingness and so there we have it there is your introduction to schopenhauer so that uh next week when we get into nietzsche in his works drawing on schopenhauer you will already know about concepts such as will representation genius the sublime the pure will-less subject of knowledge the bright mirror of the artist's perception negation of the will happiness as a negative principle the redemptive power of nature and so on and so forth um which you know all those things i just

belted off before listening to this if you've never read schopenhauer that would have sounded like a bunch of nonsense but hopefully all those terms now fire neurons for you and so from there we can begin to show how nietzsche took this picture of the world as will and was heavily influenced by it and how he was intrigued by this idea of feeling drive desire as the root of all life he was perplexed by schopenhauer's demonic conclusions about the nature of reality and uh nietzsche wrote about how his own his own romantic impulses spoke so differently

to him but you know it's my belief personally i think uh idea the ideas of schopenhauer's which are but little discussed probably had a greater impact on nietzsche or kind of under underrated um you know things like schopenhauer's view on art his view of history as simply an endlessly repeating cycle that progresses nowhere you know because to him uh reality is always only exists in the present and uh the true you know geniuses quote unquote were in uh you know motivated by genius as he sees it as a as this uh eternal remembering of uh

you know direct perception of this eternal knowledge and so that can happen anywhere anytime it's not a it's not a process of of progress um and you know finally this notion of the eternal indestructibility of being which i think provided the groundwork for nietzsche among many other influences that he had to begin thinking about the eternal recurrence um all right well thank you everybody uh for taking a trip down to the underworld with me we'll be back next week um to talk about another essay from the untimely meditations which is schopenhauer as educator all right

signing off if you enjoyed the nietzsche podcast or found it helpful you can visit us and support the show at patreon.com untimely reflections the link is in the description or just share the show with any of your friends that you think might enjoy it or on social media thank you for your support