Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Idea

[Music] arthur schopenhauer is one of the most unique and influential of germ of 19th century german philosophers and this is remarkable because in and of his in and of itself his work is if not repellent at least rather unpleasant and he is remarkable for holding views which are designed to make people uncomfortable to drive them out of their complacency and while he may be successful in driving us out of our complacency there's a sort of bitterness and a service quality to his writing which is not like other 19th century optimistic romantic writers so when you

open chopin hour for the first time be prepared for something of a shock he does not write like a typical german philosopher he has a very sprightly style which contrasts very powerfully with the rather dour and unpleasant and pessimistic content i would compare him to nietzsche if you're looking for a comparable poet philosopher in the german language and i am inclined to think that although he's not generally read as a a choice in the canon right now he is worth reading because he is so influential on people like freud or wittgenstein or nietzsche later on

in the 19th century in the early 20th century now with most philosophers i'm inclined to shy away from family background i think for example when you study kant it's pretty much not important to know what his personal life was like it doesn't tell you very much about the kanti and dingonsic it doesn't tell you very much about his philosophy that is not the case with arthur schopenhauer arthur schopenhauer's family background has a lot to do with his psychic makeup and with the stance he takes towards the world the sort of characteristic postures of his philosophy

in the first case his father committed suicide and this is the kind of thing that generally will have an extremely negative effect on the psyche a kind of permanent damage or at least long-term lasting damage a very negative view towards the world and it seems to me this carries over into schopenhauer's work when it's unmistakable the second important fact in addition to his father's suicide is the fact that his mother who survived the father was extremely cold and distant and threw him out of the house eventually broke with him so in other words he is

at sea in the social world he has no familial contacts he is almost perfectly lonely and in addition to being almost perfectly lonely it is hard to imagine a man that wallows in his own unhappiness to a greater extent than schopenhauer and he has performed the unusual service of offering to share his unhappiness with us this willingness to share is perhaps schopenhauer's sole gentle gesture towards the rest of humanity and if you keep in mind his background and the persistent and continuing negativity of his personal life i think it will inform your reading of his

philosophical works this is one of those cases where it is not possible to separate the man and the philosophy i am not sure if this should be called a philosophy i don't quite know what to call it so for the purposes of discussion let's consider it the metaphysics from hell now what are we talking about what is schopenhauer involved with well his background is quite intriguing he's a he's a consistent reader he reads a great many kinds of texts and his most important influences in terms of his philosophical reading are the great idealists particularly plato

and kant kant in particular is very important for schopenhauer there are elements in his philosophy which are borrowed directly from kant where he says rather than reinvent the wheel i will accept the kantian view here and then move on and invert the kantian view with regard to other matters so the legacy of kant is the most important for shopping hour as it is for all early 19th century german philosophers in addition to kant what's unique about schopenhauer is that he is one of the first european intellectuals to begin reading in indian religion here i'm talking

about subcontinental india and in particular schopenhauer spent a good deal of time reading the upanishads and although i don't i hadn't noticed direct references to it i believe that he'd been reading some of the works of the buddha there is a certain sort of emphasis on indian mysticism but in addition a sort of negative evaluation of the human world creating desire as a problem to be solved establishing the personality as a challenge to be overcome rather than merely a a boundary to human experience so schopenhauer has a powerful strain of indian eastern pessimism that i

think is a combination of hinduism and buddhism connected with that we have a weird combination to the tradition of german idealism he's saturated in kant and while he was at university he heard the lectures of fishta and schleiermacher so he is very much part of the tradition of german idealism the difficulty lies in the fact that he's going to take that idealist tradition and to a great extent stand it on its head schopenhauer in some respects is a one-trick pony the one trick that he knows he does all the time and he's real good at

it he takes a philosopher and perhaps borrows some elements of it keeps them the same and thereafter he stands the philosophy on its head so what what schopenhauer knows how to do is invert prior philosophies in unique and rather disturbing ways in ways you wouldn't have thought a sane man could think and the results are quite surprising and sometimes intriguing if perhaps off-putting at the same time a couple of observations first off in his essays which are in some ways the most accessible part of his work they are hard to read nowadays particularly in late

20th century america the persistent misogyny the racism the i mean repulsive characteristics of this he makes no bones about schopenhauer is in that respect an anachronism i would like to send you if you were going to read this i would like to send you to some text i am not sure that there is any text that would not be offensive and justifiably so but if you want to have an access to chopin now i would say start with the essays his great work and there's only one great work that show open hour produced is rather

intimidating and if you find you like the essays and perhaps you'd want to go on but i wouldn't start with chopin hour's main work which is called the world as will and an idea another ponderous german title for a great big book that takes the tradition of german idealism and inverts some of the main ideas and in particular schopenhauer has a definite animus towards hegel they are roughly contemporaries and while schopenhauer and hagel were both at the university of berlin hagel of course was at the apogee of his career one of the most celebrated intellectuals

in the western world and schopenhauer was schopenhauer which means that he was not going to get a wide following schopenhauer was arrogant and anti-hegelian to the point of a sort of mania decided to schedule his lectures he could schedule them at any time he wished he scheduled them directly against the hegel the lectures of hegel and hegel of course got hundreds of students to sign up for his lectures and schopenhauer got a few the first day and thereafter got none so as a result he left the university because as most intellectuals think no one understood

him and the people did not realize that he was far and away hegel superior and that just shows how benighted and wicked they are keep that in mind many frustrated intellectuals feel this way it is a remarkable how bitter and acerbic he can be if you look at some of the essays there's a wonderful line and i mean it's stuck in my brain since i read it in college he said i i wish to apologize to the reader of the future for mentioning for mentioning hegel a philosopher you have never heard of oh which is

an incredibly harsh thing to say but it tells you all you need to know about schopenhauer right or it gives you the the attitude and in some respects the style is much more important than the substance here and alas we have heard of hegel and that tells you even more about chopin hour now his great work is called the world as will and idea published as a young man in 1818 and it's a remarkable piece of work because it is such a musical construction he is a highly aesthetic man one of the perhaps disturbing or

discordant things about the history of philosophy is that it is often the case that people with wonderfully artistic styles who have great literary creativity are often neither edifying nor moral in other words it is possible to be a very bad man or to say some really unpleasant or offensive things but to say them in a very elegant way i direct you to nietzsche it is certainly possible so what we should notice here is that he's got a wonderful style and he's a german philosopher which is amazing because how many german philosophers have wonderful styles and

at the same time the content of what he is saying is often quite unpleasant often quite off-putting the four parts of the world and will of the world as will and idea were described by thomas mann as a symphony in four movements and that is a beautiful and very acute way of describing it it is sort of verbal music has a high poetic content and is certainly very pleasant if you don't stop to think about what he's telling you uh what he's the idea of the world and will is or the concept behind the world

and will as will an idea is basically this he is making the distinction characteristic of german philosophy between subject and object which also corresponds to the distinction between pneumonia and phenomena he's obviously borrowing from kant here and he's going to take parts of that and then invert other parts to come up with a new metaphysics of his own and what he's trying to do is create is first of all formulate the problem of the self what is it like to be uh a self-conscious entity in this world and after formulating this problem he's going to

show us that it has the deepest spiritual implications he's going to formulate a powerful spiritual problem something analogous to that of kierkegaard and then he's going to tell us unlike kierkegaard that this problem has no solution and that this is the human condition so like hamlet schopenhauer is trapped in an egoistic prison called the world and what he's going to do is share with us right news of what this prison is like because he seems to have discerned its perimeter uh like kierkegaard you could say that this is a relentless sort of negativity unlike kiergard

this is a sort of sinfulness without redemption which is perhaps the worst of all human conditions first part is the world as representation the german word for it is forced what that means is the world as idea and in order to explain this to you i'm going to have to drop back a little bit talk about the philosophy of mind in looking over the human kant lectures i found that we just didn't have time to cover the philosophy of mind which is so important and pregnant with implications for later philosophical developments you can't understand what

chopin power is doing unless you understand the kantian philosophy of mind you can't understand that unless i tell you a little bit about hume let's start from the beginning then for hume and the british empiricists the mind is what they call a tabula rasa means a blank slate another way of thinking about it would be that the mind is an empty box a baby gets born and starts to see and hear and touch and taste and sensations come into that empty box and then the mind and its activity of kind of making these sensations coherent

bundles them together so if i were to look at this podium for example i would see that it's hard that it has a certain degree of weight that it's smooth that it's brown and what i do is i bundle these sensations together to form a thing called the podium it makes a certain amount of sense now the problem that hume ran into is that although we see tables and chairs and people and floors and ceilings we never see certain things which we think of are important parts of the world for example hume will tell us

that you never see time you never see space you never see causality and obviously that's true if i were to drop this pen take a pen and drop it we see the causal relation we see me pick the pen up let it go and it falls and if i do that 100 times we'll see it fall every time hume's point will be though although we see the event of me holding the pen up and pen falling we never see causality all we see is a regularity between the two similarly if you look around for time

you're going to look a long time you may look at clocks you may look at calendars but all you're going to see pieces of paper and mechanisms you're not going to see time so what hume decides is that it's not there it's a sort of imaginary thing the way we we glue the universe together and kant rejects this kind of skepticism in other words we have a problem here we don't know how it is we found it about space and time and causality and being and negation and number and all the things which empiricism really

lacks a good coherent account for khan takes up that challenge what kant does is says no david hume you are wrong in fact the human mind is not a blank slate it is not a tabula rasa in fact the human mind doesn't passively absorb sensation rather it actively constructs the external world and when you miss that activity of the human mind in constructing the external world you cause yourself all kinds of philosophical paradoxes it's a brilliant answer see if i can explain it for kant think of the human mind as being a room like this

room and say that the room has one window and only one window and all your and you never the doors are locked you're never going to get outside this room that's the human mind itself now when you look at the external world when you observe and experience external reality it looks to you like external reality is shaped exactly like the window of course it is well because that's your only access to it literally speaking the shape of the window as far as you're concerned is the shape of what's outside the window in other words the

light that comes in is precisely shaped by the opening that lets it in in other words there's a form that the mind imposes on external experience and this activity of imposing these forms is a far better more accurate truer representation of the human of human cognition so instead of being a blank slate or an empty box it's actually actively constructing the external world let me give you an example from the podium i experienced the podium for example as be as being both spatial and temporal it exists in time right it was here when i started

the lecture and it'll be here when i finish with any luck and it takes up a certain space if i walk into that space i'm going to hit the podium now what khan says is that the mind contains i believe it's 12 a priori forms of the of human cognition a priori means that it's prior to our experience of the world in other words it's built in to experiencing the world as a human subject and these a priori forms necessarily shape the way we experience the external world so khan says that the external world is

composed of dingan onsich what that means is that things in themselves so there are podiums there are cups of coffee there are pieces of paper there are people and there are objects in the world but we can never experience these objects in an unmediated way the way hume assumes actually we actively construct these objects by imposing on categories we can't avoid space time causality number being negation and this is built into experiencing the world as a subject this is all this thousands of pages of philosophy are encapsulated in a line from t.s eliot in the

four quartets where he says he's in the rose garden he says the roses had the look of flowers that are looked at that beautiful that just gets it all together well the podium has the look of a podium that is looked at it's not like this in and of itself we can't find out what the podium is in and of itself we have to experience the world through space time causality through these necessary forms that's why we all know what space is but nobody can explain it to you right if somebody really said they didn't

know what quantity was what would we do we all know what quantity is we just can't explain it it's built right into the hard wiring of the human psyche it's a deep answer a very important answer and this is what schopenhauer takes as his foundation in other words the first movement of the world as idea the world has forced along the world is representation in other words he's saying that the external world is what kant says it is it's one big idea so we have all these overlapping forms and our whole experience of the world

is one big idea so in the first part of this he's being a good kantian and he is saying that the whole phenomenal world is one big four shalom the subject constructs the object okay it's an activity of the mind now what kant says in addition to this or it's cor correlative of this is that we can't know the ding on zik ding on zik means the thing in itself i can't experience the podium as it really is i guess in the mind of god independent of space and time and causality and number i have

to look through the window i have no choice my only access to it but that means that we all we never experience the external world as it is we experience the way external world as a human being has to experience things so far so good what that means is that we can never know these things in and of themselves we never get direct access to pneumona we only have the phenomenal world which we construct through the a priori forms now in the second movement of schopenhauer's work what he says is no kant is wrong he's

going to invert kant and says yes there is one example of direct apprehension of a numeral ding on zig and the one thing that i can know about in this particular way in this numeral way the one thing the one ding on zika that i can know is the will my own self-consciousness in other words my own consciousness of myself as a self is not mediated by the a priori forms i have direct immediate apprehension of that fact and this is numeral this is not phenomenal this is the thing in itself so what he's saying

then is that the outside world is just like khan said it was right it's uh mediated by the a priori forms the internal world alas is not the way kant thought it was it's one unitary thing will and we get direct immediate apprehension of that and this introduction of the idea of will into german philosophy or an emphasis on will is going to have is going to be pregnant with very important consequences for the late 19th and early 20th century if you think of people like nietzsche right this easily gets transformed into the will to

power so what we're going to see here is that my knowledge of the internal world is of my own will and what that means is that human beings like hob said are desiring animals we desire this we desire that but you uh schopenhauer will change that slightly and say yes we are desiring animals but we do not know ourselves we do not really know our own wills consciousness is only a subset of will reason is only a subset of will and in fact will is a force that reason neither controls nor understands we are subject

to a terrifying force bigger than we are mysterious to us that we are unable to control this will be a great prelude to freud if you think about the idea of the unconscious as being a part of our will a part of our kagito that we are unaware of this begins to make a certain degree of sense so we lose that enlightenment optimism the idea that we are in control we are reasonable animals in control of our wills in fact the will is controlling us and the will is a mysterious force that we find in

not just an individual people but in all of nature and all of human beings as a whole so it's one big unitary thing and we can get knowledge of this numeral ding on zig directly will is a blind a teleological force which animates all of nature it would be worth comparing this to spinoza's idea of canaatus the desire of all things to continue being what they are and it's a sort of inversion of that all things would like to be something else but they really don't have any control of what they are so they kind

of muddle along as best they can it's an extremely sort of pessimistic view of the human psyche we are play things in the hands of not even god but something less than god because it doesn't have a will and doesn't like us it just is what it is it's a sort of terrifying view of human beings as being kind of froth on the ocean of reality now this is a problem because in some ways it's anti-socratic it means essentially that you can't know yourself or that if you can know yourself it's only after the fact

in other words you find out what you really willed when you find out what you really did this would again hooks up with freud why did i forget that person's name because you really didn't like them and you really didn't want to talk to them well i mean this is foreshadowed in schopenhauer's work you come back later on you said i wish i'd remember that person's name and then you realized yourself you didn't will too that's why you didn't so there's a theory of parapraxis here that freud is going to i think take up so

what do we get we get the world as outside and the world is inside the world as outside is the world is idea the world is inside is the world as well and this faces us with a problem what the hell are we and how are we to deal with all these difficulties that the world confronts us with because we are desiring animals and desire is a purely negative condition here comes the buddhism here comes the hinduism here comes that kind of pessimistic eastern philosophy desire is a problem and the only sensible thing to do

is to try and get away from desire and the human life and human life is one of privation we'd be better off not existing at all but because we do we must lurch from one desire to another never really being in control of them and even the satisfaction of our desires is purely negative in other words uh satisfying your desire for food for sex for love for anything right is like scratching an itch it's nice when you scratch it but you're better off not feeling itchy you're better off not feeling anything you're better off not

existing at all but alas you do exist and so what are we supposed to do with this mess of a world you can see that the connection between this and buddha's eight noble truths suffering death disease this is what the human condition is we long for nirvana we long for the abolition of the self we long essentially for death all right this is cheery i mean no i mean do you see well i this is described as a pessimism i mean it would be hard to think of anything more relentlessly negative than schopenhauer so we

have the dubious possibility of self-knowledge we have the problem of the self it is a spiritual problem and alas it has no spiritual solution which is truly pathetic and the last four two movements of this great philosophical symphony this kind of exercise and negativity are an attempt to solve the problem of the world as idea in movement three and then movement four it's an attempt to solve the problem of the world as well let's look at the third section solution to the problem of numina the solution to the problem of the world as idea how

can we escape from this prison of subjectivity that we are locked into by the kantian categories how will we be something other than purely contingent purely subjective beings aching for release from this veil of maya this continuous parade of desires that we neither need nor gratify well there are two ways out according to schopenhauer and i think this is the greatest contribution of his book to be honest in other words this has certainly been the most influential part first way out is through aesthetics art offers us a sort of redemption as schopenhauer said artistic aesthetic

satisfaction aesthetic apprehension is the purest kind of objectivity and there's a certain plausibility of that in other words i'm not convinced that that's wrong that may be the case and it certainly has been very influential in the history of aesthetics usually or it's often the case that when philosophers give up on the idea of theology when they give up on the idea of moral order to the world the second best or next best alternative is to look for some sort of erzotz transcendence in the realm of art and that essentially is what schopenhauer does he

says for the aesthetic man when you appreciate something aesthetically you can only do so in a moment of heightened objectivity this is as objective as people ever get there's a certain sense to that i can believe that in addition not only is aesthetic apprehension the closest human beings come to objectivity but the construction of art the artistic genius or artistic genius as a whole is nothing but objectivity so you know a great artist by the works that are produced and you see in these great works of art when you aesthetically apprehend them that this artist

did see the world as it really is so he has been very influential in aesthetics i think that most moral or political philosophers are not impressed by schopenhauer but i think in the theory of art this has often been worthwhile and when the book gets excerpted if insofar as it ever does this is the part that usually comes out um in addition to the idea of or connected with this idea of aesthetics we get certain ideas about schopenhauer's view of art which are particularly terrifying and bizarre and perverse um first off he has some very

fine thoughts about about art itself art is the highest cognitive activity obviously this is an inversion of plato he spent a great deal of time reading that and where's art on the divided line plato at the very bottom he stands on its head and says no the highest cognitive activity is art why because it's the only avenue to objectivity it makes a certain degree of sense but then when you get to brass tacks when he starts to talk about his specific views on art i don't know if you feel this way but i'm always shaking

my head think about his views on tragedy and look at this as an inversion of aristotle's poetics aristotle said a real good tragedy you get a bigger than life man an excellent heroic sort of a guy with one fatal flaw and then he meets catastrophe on account of this flaw and we get a catharsis and you know this the hero has hubris and all the stuff we get in the poetics schopenhauer says no that's not my idea of a tragedy schopenhauer's idea of a real good tragedy should be an average kind of a guy who

has something really terrible happen to him due to no real fault of his own this is allegedly edifying in fact it is terrifying the idea that well average people meet terrible catastrophes for no real reason and that this is the highest objectivity apparently this is the way the world really is go back to the buddha have a look at the four at the eight noble truths this is his you know it's a sort of anti-tragedy right where we get average-sized people just meeting the everyday catastrophe is no big deal right and what it means is

that suffering is accessible to us all matter of fact we can can't avoid it much less do anything about it so the best we can do is have an art which tells us what the world really is meaningless chaotic suffering may i suggest that there is a reason why kafka liked schopenhauer so much this is an anticipation of the novels of franz kafka one day gregor samso wakes up and finds out that he's a bug gregor sampson is not an especially interesting guy and he suffers for no reason that anybody understands yeah yeah this is

really influential and that i think is its most is its greatest justification why we would want to include something like this in the great books because it's pregnant with so much of later german culture in addition to aesthetic or in addition to tragedy he also talks about music and his views on music were very popular among late 19th century composers particularly wagner really liked his music or his views on music and of course schopenhauer disdained wagner completely well anyone that would admire him you can imagine that schopenhauer would disdain i mean think about the kind

of psyche where you can't argue with a sick mind and this guy has some sort of a problem there is no conflict between being crazy and being really gifted and he's one of the best examples of that so he says that music is the direct uh apprehension and the direct statement it's a copy of the will itself that is why we don't need to translate music into from one language to another it is complete non-symbolic uh non-conventional communication it talks from one will to the other directly you get a direct understanding of that and of

course that's the highest kind of objectivity you can see why wagner would gravitate towards it and you can see why schopenhauer would disdain wagner meshes together very nicely the other way out of this problem of the external world this problem of subjectivity the problem of the world as idea besides aesthetics is ethics and this is a very odd thing i wouldn't have expected this guy to be writing about ethics aesthetics one imagine would be enough but no he says that aesthetics also offer us a way out of this prison of subjectivity and the way we

do that is by breaking down the illusory bounds of the ego the saint in both the buddhist and the christian tradition is one whose loving kindness overflows the boundaries of the self so that he recognizes in another's pain another suffering his own suffering the point being that universal compassion is the foundation of both of both buddhist and christian ethics and the saint as well as the artist are the only two people that can get outside the prison of subjectivity we have an aesthetic objectivity which we get which was communicated through art we have an ethical

objectivity which is communicated through charitable actions which show that you have gotten beyond the illusory bounds of the self and this escape from the self is what this philosophy is all about and if you were arthur schopenhauer you would want to escape from yourself too no i'm thinking about it i mean you want to live with this all right now this the final chapter is perhaps the most intriguing of all in some ways the most depressing of all here we're going to get beyond will beyond our understanding of our numeral selves and it gets blacker

and blacker as we go in you call this tough love i mean i guess he's trying to do us some benefit but maybe not it's hard to tell with schopenhauer and he thinks that nihilism can be really edifying i mean i would be tempted to say nihilism can be fun but it doesn't quite capture the idea it's good for you to realize how bad things are or in a world in a world where that is terrible it's good to know the worst or at least here's the worst and i hope it's good for you take

it and do something with it and what we get here is the solution to the problem of the internal man of the will two ways around it asceticism and mysticism and the idea here is that we are a bundle of desires and we move from one desire to another the only way to get beyond desire is the traditional path of both christian and buddhist mystics and saints denial of the flesh fasting self flagellation living as a hermit or an anchor right all these are denials of the will and when you face the will down and

you chase the will away and you achieve this kind of buddhistic indifference the indifference of the of the christian saint who has removed himself from society who constantly denies his will this gives you some access to a if not a blessed condition of life the best possible human life which is a relentlessly grim thought that asceticism is a way out um think of the buddha's eight noble truths right death suffering old age or inevitable to us the best thing for us is not to be born but who's so lucky is that and if you have

to be born want to face your will down to control your will to exert a will to power over yourself this is going to hark back to nietzsche once again that's the best thing a human being can do in addition to that mysticism is another way out because what that does is collapse rational thought altogether collapses the distinction between the will and idea and mysticism and asceticism have in common the fact that they both long for the abolition of the self this is worship of your own extinction it's embracing your own finitude because the particular

time that and space and experience that are contained within your finitude are relentlessly awful so it's a pursuance of your own extinction and you can see how this is going to fold back a great many uh themes from the upanishads or from hindu and buddhist thinking the difference of course being in the case of the hindus that you're not that you're coming back there that suicide is no way out whereas this longing for death longing for extinction i think is a sort of philosophical suicide or a sort of a ode to death something like that

now the conclusions that schopenhauer draws here about the human condition are two first of all and this is i mean inverted and bizarre and negative he says that leibniz was wrong leibniz said that this is the best of all possible worlds and in fact schopenhauer points out that this is the worst of all possible worlds not that that leibniz's claim is dubiously voltaire says but he says look this is clearly the worst of all possible worlds if it was any worse it wouldn't exist at all it's just just good enough so that it has some

existence but if this world got any worse it just wouldn't exist the fact that exists shows just how bad it is now this proved nothing what this is is a statement about his inner psychic experience it really tells you nothing about the world any more than leibniz's idea that the this is the best of all possible worlds tells you anything right it's more a state of mind than a logical procedure in addition to the idea that this is the worst of all possible worlds remember when i called this the metaphysics from hell can you see

why i think that the second proposition is that it is better not to be born right you're better off not existing at all here's why we are a bundle of desires we are a collection of questions our desires never get satisfied and our questions never get answered right and you're stuck with them all right and schumer just wants to throw in the towel like release me but there's no god to pray to so he does this right and you can see why this is bizarre but tremendously influential it represents a certain state of mind um

the reason why it is better never to have been born is because pleasure is purely negative in other words when you have a desire for pleasure food sex whatever it is that gives you pleasure all right that's a state of deprivation a state of uh being incomplete and when you get your desires gratified well you're happy for about 15 minutes but they're going to come back and you get a constantly constant circulating round of desire you can't gratify them all and even when you do they don't stay gratified he wants to eat lunch and never

get hungry again and the fact is that you're going to get hungry again and that's the way the world is and he says well that's exactly my point why do we need a world like this would be better off not having these sensations at all and not having any gratification of them and this is the this is getting your desires gratified you should see what he thinks about getting them not gratified right you see i mean the two really terrible things that could happen to you can get what you want or not get what you

want right this is the metaphysics from hell wicked philosophers are sent to hell and forced to think about this stuff right no and this i mean no wonder he wants to escape from being stuck in the prison of this ego right anybody would so asceticism mysticism is the solution to the problem of the self the solution to the problem of subjectivity and your relation to the external world the problem the solution there is ethics and aesthetics these are the highest achievements of man and they don't amount to anything all right and you should see what

the rest of the world is like you see just relentless it gets worse and worse and worse it spirals down into an endless pit of permanent depression and i guess his revenge on this cruel world is to turn this into a system of metaphysics and send it to us right so we could call this schopenhauer's revenge now alas this revenge is of great consequence to the history of the west he has been certainly a standard fixture in german culture since uh i know since the middle of the 19th century and any educated person in the

german speaking world in the late 19th century would have been familiar with schopenhauer certainly it's clear that freud was cl was familiar with schopenhauer grew up in vienna but also if you think of the idea first of all of unconscious motivation right freud says that we are often not conscious of what really makes us go you think that your consciousness is your will it's not well that is not original to freud that is actually something introduced by schopenhauer freud looks a great deal more original than he turns out to be if you haven't read schopenhauer

and it's clear enough why people don't right but actually he's pregnant with many of the themes that get developed later on in the next hundred years or so of german philosophy the idea of consciousness is being a mere surface there being a depth there that you really can't plumb another theme that gets picked up by freud introduced by schopenhauer the theory of parapraxis of freudian slips schopenhauer says that reveals your real will you idiot you don't know what you will until you actually do it then go back and examine yourself that's what you will stop

kidding yourself and in addition to that the idea of sex is the focus of the will schopenhauer is very caught up with the body and desire he says that the genitals are the focus of the will what's more a more freudian theme than that right if you stop and think about it the emphasis on irrational desire irrational motivation that's going to become so pervasive in german culture in the late 19th and early 20th century all anticipated in chopin hour a second cluster of themes that chopin hour is important for is the idea of art as

redemption art as a new pseudo-secular path if not to heaven to some sort of secular blessedness nietzsche picks this up but all the the uh the athletes of the late 19th century the art for art's sake crowd all pick up on this idea that if we cannot get access to the heaven of the christian saints perhaps we can get access to the earth of the pagan artists that this is the best we could possibly do so art as redemption a sort of secular religion um in a way you could say that schopenhauer is a sort

of a philosophical formulation of german romanticism right goethe over luther right redemption through art through creativity or through at least the apprehension of creativity rather than through some religious impossibility and the final i guess important thing that he introduces is the idea of will over intellect in other words intellect is a he describes it as the rider of a horse right you know and the horse is the will the will moves you around and the will is really making the decision the perhaps has to be a an ill-tamed horse or horse wish you don't have

a bridle you're going where it's going and you think and you like to believe that you're really leading it in fact it is pushing you around do not flatter yourself with with your misconceptions about your own autonomy and this leads over to a couple of tendencies in early 20th century philosophy first of all vitalism of various kinds that we're going to see in bergson and the other big tendency i would say is the volunteerism of people like sorel and various kinds of later existentialist writers commit yourself to something authentic commitment is going to be really

important and there's going to be no ultimate rational ground for it just go out and do something don't just stand there so the idea of volunteering of will pushing around just will something go out and do something great gets picked up in many important parts of german culture a final thing i would say is that um this sort of resistance to or disapproval of christianity he doesn't have much for the optimistic idea of salvation and of reconciliation with god because the world is a giant vacuum to schopenhauer so i would say that that gets picked

up particularly by nietzsche later on in the 20th century and nietzsche's writings are suffused with schopenhauer in other words he in particular called schopenhauer the only serious moralist of the 19th century i mean nietzsche loved schopenhauer and what it is is he's got a little more interesting and sprightly idea and perhaps he's not so chronically depressed but nietzsche's influence on schopenhauer is enormously important the first time nietzsche read the world his will and idea the next thing he did was read it again and it was he read it twice in a row said this is

the best book i've seen in quite some time this is my kind of book well i think the thing speaks for itself so i'd be inclined to say in looking over schopenhauer's corpus and his work as a whole is that he's not so important for the work itself in other words there are interesting themes that get introduced into philosophy in a very unique and queer way in this pessimistic mode his great importance lies in the fact that he influenced three or four subsequent german uh generations of philosophers particularly german philosophers and they carried these themes

out and then performed their own individual kind of twist or yeah impose their own individual kind of twist on these themes think about a couple of them freud with the idea of unconscious motivation desire is a problem and also think of freud's pessimism think of things like a civilization as discontents it's not as radical of pessimism as we get with schopenhauer but both of them agree that the human condition is basically made up of unsatisfied and unsatisfiable desires now freud is willing to say well that's not such a bad thing the trade the trade-off to

give up civilization would be worse in other words he's a little less relentless a little less complete in this negativity but freud's social philosophy or his kind of conception of human of the human condition is highly pessimistic and owes a great deal to schopenhauer in addition to freud nietzsche uh the irrationalism of nietzsche the forsaking of rationality and traditional uh optimism of the enlightenment all borrowed from chopin hour uh in particular the idea of taking chopin howe's idea of the will and transforming it into the will to power which we see like schopenhauer not just

in individuals but in nature and in the world as a whole very clearly the will to power is an extrapolation for chopin now there's no doubt about it it's one of the most important ideas in nature a third figure that's very important for schopener and it's kind of surprising is ludwig wittgenstein and literally wittgenstein is kind of a surprising choice here because he doesn't seem to have fallen into this philosophical pessimism that's so characteristic of schopenhauer but it seems that vicki schneider spent a great deal of time going back and reading this now maybe this

is connected with the fact that wittgenstein spent most of his life depressed and near the age of suicide right i can't think that this helped him out any right but wittgenstein was a chronically morose chronically depressed individual and perhaps that's what attracts him to this kind of thought or perhaps it's just because he grew up in 19th century vienna but the point is that wittgenstein takes from the idea of this kind of posture of melancholy right and the idea that we've reached the bounds of language when we come up to aesthetics and what happens when

we try and formulate aesthetics or ethics into language is we run up against the glass boundaries of language we can't say anything it turns into either mysticism or noise now wittgenstein says well that's not so bad at the end of the tractatus what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence i think victorine is suggesting that it's there we just can't talk about it what schopenhauer are saying is just it's just not there right so there's really no aesthetics there's no ethics we're at the boundaries of language then when we move up to

these boundaries what we get is symbols gestures and noise clearly this is going to drive a man towards a sort of philosophical melancholy if he isn't melancholic to begin with uh i'd be inclined to say and just concluding and finishing schopenhauer up is that this combination of kant indian mysticism and romantic velchmerz right is a strange sort of a brew i mean you wouldn't think that the human mind could connect all these things in the same conceptual framework and i might be able to take a sort of a kierkegaardian reading of schopenhauer this is an

ode to boredom the world is full of nothing the world is an empty vacuum the world offers you nothing except misery or nothing except negative experiences and that you might want to say that this is a sort of demonic inversion of pantheism and this is pantheism stood upside down instead of the world being full of god the world is full of nothing and that's that's that's the best you're going to get it gets worse all right but the best you're going to do is be able to confront your nothing confront your boredom and then get

involved with aesthetic contemplation renounce yourself get involved with say asceticism or mysticism the point is that the problem of the world is insoluble the problem of the self has no solution we are left with a spiritual difficulty a spiritual kind of tar pit that we can't pull ourselves out of before we succumb to death he wants us to understand that it's the best thing we can do [Music]