Arthur Schopenhauer - Bryan Magee & Frederick Copleston (1987)

it might be supposed that philosophy of all subjects must be free from the vagaries of fashion but that is not so in philosophy just as in other human activities in each generation there seems to be a reaction against the values of the previous generation so writers that have been widely studied fall into neglect and new figures come to the fore the outcome is apt to be that at any given time and place many of the same philosophers are being studied by everyone and a number of other well-known philosophers are being neglected by at any rate nearly everyone then a new generation comes along and re-evaluates one or two of the neglected philosophers so that they then come back into fashion and so it goes on among the philosophers to whom this has happened most conspicuously in the last 200 years is schopenhauer for most of his lifetime roughly the first half of the 19th century he was almost totally disregarded then in the second half of the 19th century he became one of the most famous and influential of all philosophers then in the first half of the 20th century he fell into a neglect so profound that even most teachers of philosophy no longer read him but now in our own time he is unmistakably coming back to people's attention not least because he was a formative influence on one of the most important 20th century philosophers wittgenstein arthur schopenhauer was born in danzig now gdansk in 1788 his family had been rich hanseatic merchants for generations and the upbringing he received was aimed not at an academic life but at training him to step into an international business however he had no interest in the family firm he insisted on going to university instead and thereafter he used his private means to finance a lifetime of independent study and writing his doctorate thesis has become a minor classic in spite of its title on the four-fold root of the principle of sufficient reason and he was still in his twenties during the four years when he composed his masterpiece the world as will and representation which was published in 1818 the year in which he was 30. from then until his death in 1860 at the age of 72 he published a great deal but all of it was to extend or elaborate or enrich the philosophical system which he had constructed in his twenties and from which he never departed he produced a huge collection of essays called perega and paralipomina and two short but pungent books on ethics called the basis of morality and the freedom of the will there was also a little book called on the will in nature designed to show that his ideas were supported by discoveries in science most important of all he published a revised edition of the world as will and representation which was more than twice the length of the original volume there are several remarkable things about him although in direct succession to kant's his own work was securely in the mainstream of western philosophy he was genuinely knowledgeable about hinduism and buddhism and is the only major western philosopher to draw serious and interesting parallels between western and eastern thought he was the first major western philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist he placed the arts higher in the scheme of things and had more to say about them than any other important philosopher and perhaps partly for that reason his influence on creative artists of the front rank has exceeded that of any other philosopher of the modern era he was himself among the supreme writers of german prose many of his sentences are so brilliantly aphoristic that they've been torn out of context by the hundred and published separately in little books of epigrams intellectually this is a catastrophe because it obscures the fact that schopenhauer is first and foremost a system builder whose philosophy can be understood only as a whole of the books in print about it in english at the time of making this program i have to confess to you that the longest and most recent is by me but i can't very well interview myself so i've invited the author of one of the others to come along and discuss sherpanhar with me my guest is in any case the most distinguished living historian of philosophy in the english language frederick coppelston emeritus professor in the university of london in addition to his extended treatment of schopenhauer in his nine volume history of philosophy he's written a separate book about him called arthur schopenhauer philosopher of pessimism well professor coppelston i think the place we ought to start is by addressing ourselves to the question of what it was that schopenhauer set out to do perhaps i should let you take that up well mr speaker i think that um like other original philosophers a great many of them uh schopenhauer wanted to understand the world in which he found himself the world in which he lived or one could say he tried to form a coherent unified interpretation of human experience ought to gain conceptual mastery over the world phenomena the plurality of phenomena i think that is it and to do that schopenhauer thought that it was necessary to identify the underlying reality if one asked why he thought that it was an underlying reality to um identify i suppose that the reason one main reason is that he started from the premises of immanuel kant and that he thought that the the way in which we see the world is a human perspective that the human mind is pre-programmed to see the world in certain ways and we can't for example experience objects except the situated in space and time subject to special temporal relations and is subject to the relation of causality but um it obviously doesn't follow it because things appear to one in a certain way that that is how they are apart from the way in which they appear as they are in themselves can't certainly look at the the concept of a thing in itself is not as that which appears but is can be considered in distinction from the from the appearance was a sensible idea and schopenhauer took that over i think this is such an important idea and we're going to come back to it in different ways that it's worth going over again because it is it's difficult i think for people who are new to him to really get hold of it sometimes um kant had argued that uh all possible experience can only come to us through our faculties through our sensory and mental apparatus and therefore what we could experience depended not only on what there is out there to experience but also on the nature of the faculties that we possess what our faculties could handle what they do to what they handle how they handle it and so on so that all experience as such is subject dependent and he went on from that to argue that therefore we could see total reality as being divided into two there are things as they are in themselves independently of being experienced and to such things we have no means of access and then there's things as they appear to us the world of appearances the world as it comes to us through experience and that's what we know that's the world of common sense the world of science the our total world now uh said uh schopenhauer took this up from kant and said now what can we get any pointers can we get any hints from a close analysis of this world of experience as to what it might be that underlies it as to what it might be that lies behind it that at least is part of the thought isn't it yes it is i think it's important to remember that for shopping how it can be only one underlying reality about the himself took it as a matter of common sense i think that if there's a the table as it appears then there must be the table as it is in itself and if the carpet as it appears then there's the carpet in itself that there are a multitude of things in themselves but of course if um we think away spatial and temporal relations and the causal relation there's no means of distinguishing one thing from another so that if the underlying reality transcends space and time and causality and is quite other than the world of phenomena then the canoe number one the plurality or multiplicity belongs to the world of phenomena but the underlying reality must be one these ideas that we are dealing with are really so difficult that i think that is worth going over again as well i think it'll help a lot of people uh schopenhauer argued that for one thing to be different from another thing for anything to be different from anything else at all this idea of differentiation only made sense with reference either to time or to space or to both if two things are identical in time and identical in space then they're identical period they're the same thing so the notion of there being different things in the plural could only apply to this world of our experience this world of space and time outside that world it could make no sense whatever to talk of anything being different from anything else and therefore i just like to to to complete this thought therefore whatever there is outside this world of our experience must be one and undifferentiated and in taking that step from kant he thought can't have been wrong in talking about things in the plural in themselves things as they are in themselves that it must be one undifferentiated something that lies behind this world now in seeing that he took an enormous stride towards one of the central beliefs of hinduism and buddhism those religions also believe that behind this highly differentiated plural variegated world of phenomena there is one single undifferentiated something that manifests itself as this world and one striking thing is that schopenhauer didn't get the belief from buddhism or hinduism he got it by arguing from premises that he derived from his predecessor western philosophers and then discovered that he'd reached a conclusion which was similar to that of the buddhists and the hindus yes well i'd like to go back a moment to the um what you've been just saying about the uh only one underlying reality i think that if one starts from the premises of a manual count i mean i wouldn't myself but if one does then schopenhauer is right because if the the snowbeans are distinguishing uh one thing in itself from another i think except as a matter of common sense um there's no formal way of distinguishing once you accept uh the canton premises that schopenhauer did taking the argument to the next stage said to speak schopenhauer thought didn't he that if we analyze this world of phenomena uh we might get from it some clues as to what the underlying one which he called following can't the the pneumanon or the no women on it's a word from the greek we might get some idea of what the numenom is and i think his great starting point was this that can't had argued that all our knowledge of material objects must come to us and it can come to us only through our senses and thereby as it were put together by our minds schopenhauer said well this is almost exactly right but there is one absolutely crucial exception to it which amazingly can't seem to have overlooked and that is that for every individual one of us there is one unique physical object in the world which we we know in the way kant says we know physical objects but we also know in a radically and entirely different way namely directly from inside and that is ourselves our own bodies our own persons they are physical objects in the way that any other physical object is a physical object and they can be seen and touched and heard and known in all the ways that other physical objects are known but each one of us in addition to that has immediate non-sensory knowledge of this one physical object from inside directly and schopenhauer thought that this knowledge of a physical object from inside might provide us with the key to the inner nature of things that's what he thought personally i think that if one starts with kant's premises everyone must accept guns agnosticism i don't see there's any way of getting out of it but uh certainly you're quite right of course that that is what schopenhauer thought that that there was an access through the through the body the only difficulty is it seems to me that our idea of even our idea of an ultimate reality is belongs on those premises to the world of phenomena and there's no way outside the circle and beyond the simply lies um silence as wittgenstein was to say in the track theatres and um however it's quite perfectly true that chirping how thought there was a hint given through our experience of our bodies yes i would want to defend schopenhauer up to this point in the argument because he makes the point that the knowledge that we have of ourselves directly from inside is not knowledge of kant's thing in itself and there are two or three very important reasons why it's not one is that the knowledge we have from ourselves from inside is still only a kind of superficial knowledge decades in advance of freud he argued very specifically and at length that most of our own inner life and motivation and so on is unknown to us that our actions and our speech and our decisions are for the most part unconsciously motivated so that in a very important sense we don't even know our full inner selves another reason why he thought it wasn't knowledge of kant's thing in itself is that it exists in the dimension of time though it doesn't exist in the dimension of space and time can be a characteristic only of this this world of ours and there was a third reason which i think is worth mentioning and it's this uh schopenhauer argued that all knowledge must be of a dual form subject and object noah and known observer and observed that for there to be any knowledge at all of anything you must have something that's grasped and something that's grasping it and this differentiation can for reasons that we were giving only a few minutes ago in a different context differentiation can only exist within this phenomenal world this world of experience and therefore it's only in this world that there can be knowledge or can be consciousness yes that uh schopenhauer anticipated freud in remarkable ways is perfectly true and uh helps to show the importance and of schopenhauer in the history of thought i think but of course it's also true i think that all our ideas of these infra the idea that there is an infra-conscious that all belongs to the phenomenal world and um there we are i mean can't supremacy is guns conclusion we must start to say something about how he how he did point across the gulf as it were towards the luminance he thought that that there was something about this inner experience of ours that gave us a clue didn't he as to what the ultimate nature of things outside this world is can you take up the story forever i'd say that for example that my bodily movements the schopenhauer would be expressions of desire or he would say use the word will perhaps unfortunately but um one might use force or energy but to any rate if i move my arm i will to move my arm for schopenhauer is later for wittgenstein there's no entity called a will that is distinct from the movement of the arm and causes it but the volition is the inside as it were of the movement and the physical movement is the outside not trying to deny that there is some inside and if we consider that and as you say the unconscious motivation that lies behind the good deal of our actions we can anyway get the idea of a reality as a kind of infra conscious below conscious drive that schopenhauer called will and that perhaps some better name can be given to us force or energy something of that kind but that the we have that hint as to the nature of the ultimate reality as an unconscious striving or striving for existence for life for self-recession or whatever you can describe it in various ways of course yes he thought didn't he that if we analyze this world of experience the world of science if you like the world of common sense uh which does consist for the most part of matter in motion and most of it is matter in colossal amounts i mean galaxies and solar systems and so on traveling through the cosmos at gigantic speeds approaching that of light so the whole material universe consists of matter in motion um to a degree that so to speak defies our imagination to really conceptualize it and he argued i mean he there was steps in the argument that we haven't time to go through but he argued following on from kant that al what is ultimate in all this must be energy he argued that mata is as it were instantiated energy that a physical object is a space filled with force that ultimately all matter must be transmutable into energy and it's very striking i think that that particular doctrine of his has been entirely borne out by 20th century science when the physicists in our century arrived at this conclusion they thought they were propounding something revolutionary and incredible that in fact can't and schopenhauer arrived at this conclusion over 100 years before them by pure rational reasoning of it out from ordinary experience yes when one's talking about theoretical physics one has to remember that so many physicists to sometimes yeah um loathe to say that the terms such as energy and so on denote any reality aren't they that they're of use within the framework of theoretical uh physics but that it can't be taken that there's some kind of metaphysical reality called energy or so on but i i i i can quite see the point of substituting energy for chauvin has will in this well you're attributing to me a step i don't quite take i mean they they they're yes [Laughter] i mean what i wanted to say was this schopenhauer argues that what is ultimate in this world of phenomena in this world of experience is energy yes and at the scientific level in speaking from the standpoint of our own day he can be said to have been remarkably pre-violent about perhaps have now he says that what the the metaphysical the underlying pneumonian is whatever manifests itself as this energy and throughout the cosmos i mean in the stars on the solar system in animals in trees in falling stones in ourselves in everything uh it's the unconscious energy that forms us in the womb that makes our organs work while we sleep and so on and i understand him as saying that the nearest we come to getting any glimmering of what that is in experience is the experience we have inside ourselves of the energy the go the force the will to exist the will to survive that somehow ultimate and irreducible push or drive which is underlying to everything else yes but then of course jordan wasn't indifferent to the ultimate to the underlying reality was he i mean he adopted quite definite attitudes and negative attitudes towards it just valuing it and in energy is such a a neutral word that it um i mean it's hard to say whether one approves the energy or disapproves of energy likes energy or doesn't like energy it's very difficult to say whereas we're both very well aware i mean had a very definite attitude towards the ultimate reality and its manifestations but i think it would have been better if he'd used the word energy because he decided to give the term the name will to this metaphysical reality and i think that's misled people ever since because we can't help associating the idea of a personality with a will or the idea of an aim with a will when schopenhauer himself reiterates at different points in his writings that he doesn't mean that that in his sense of the word will everything has a will a dead star or a stone has as much will as you or i that it is simply the metaphysical substratum as it were in everything that it's not personal not alive not organic not has no aim and so on i think it's misled people an an impersonal word like energy would have been very much better in my opinion well i think you're quite right on on that particular point my my own point that i was hinting at was that as schopenhauer looked on the ultimate reality is perfectly revolting and suppose is willing to speak of it on occasion even in moral terms as wicked um i mean one wouldn't naturally be led to think of energy as revolting i was not revolting at least i wouldn't um and certainly not as wicked and so well that's what i meant it has this definite attitude towards the ultimate real and towards its manifestation of course this world empirical world but now perhaps we can as it were change our attack a little and confront that head-on up to this point in our discussion we've been sketching what schopenhauer's picture yes of reality was what he thought the overall picture was now let's talk about his attitude towards it he thought that the world was an appalling place a terrible place he thought it was full of injustice disease repression that at the hospitals and prisons of the world were full of people going through the most appalling sufferings and tortures that nature was read in tooth and claw that in every hour of every day thousands upon thousands of animals are tearing each other to pieces alive and devouring each other alive and that the whole thing is a sort of appalling nightmare it's an incredible vision and it's expressed in prose of such dramatic power that no one who's ever read it is likely to forget it but that was his view wasn't it of the way things are and therefore that the underlying metaphysical reality must be such as to express itself in these terms and must therefore be something terrible something nightmarish that's why he is renowned quite rightly for being a pessimist the pessimist above all philosophers the bleak black view of reality of course he didn't leave it there did he i mean he had some suggested some ways out the temporary way through aesthetic contemplation through art through the creation of art and through the appreciation of art which stills desire and selfishness and longing and hostility and conflict for the time being at the narrator so i can go into an art gallery and come and look at the pictures and without desiring anything but then of course one comes out and runs into a cafe or a pub and a desire need and desire reassert themselves but it's a temporary way out uh i i think it was a mistake for sure but to bring in the um that point the platonic ideas as intermediate between the ultimate reality and the work of art because i don't see this much place in his system but he's quite right in making a distinction between the aesthetic attitude towards things and the attitude of trying to appropriate them and and use them for one's own advantage is quite true there there is a temporary way out yes you're making the point that he thought that the aesthetic attitude was disinterested yes that normally if i see a plate of food i think in terms of eating it this is something for my own sustenance or to satisfy my lusts or desires or greed or just simply hunger or whatever it might be whereas if i see a dutch painting of a plate of food i don't see it in that light at all i see it as entirely sort of impersonal disinterested way and then i'm conscious of its presence or absence of aesthetic qualities yes beauty or lack of beauty it may be but but it's a quite different way of looking at things yes one one point that i think is worth drawing attention to in schopenhauer's aesthetic is that he did think that the arts provided us with a special way of knowing things and by that very token he did not regard them as a means of expression if i produce the work of art my what i'm doing primarily according to schopenhauer isn't expressing my emotions or giving expression to my feelings it's expressing insight or knowledge into something about the way things are i think one can give meaning to that as in the um the idea that was going around when i was undergraduate in the 20s i mean propagated largely by clive bell a significant form one might put that instead of the platonic ideas something like that i think it's as to the idea of truth in art i think it's a very interesting subject and a difficult subject and i've never really made up my mind um about it as to the truth in art um i think one must have though it's rather off the point um an analogical view of truth in which uh truth according to the context can be understood in different ways as correspondence in one context but not i think in in art it wouldn't take it would be another kind of truth and that has to be examined i think it's a perfectly respectable line of thought certainly and one well worth pursuing um and certainly making a critical remark about sherman has used the platonic ideas i didn't mean to say that they i didn't think there was anything in his view but because i do i think it's very well worth considering certainly and it's had an enormous appeal to many great artists certainly who obviously therefore thought that it corresponded to their conception yeah that's what it was they were doing undoubtedly yes undoubtedly i think we must move on now to consideration of of schopenhauer's morals what would you say was the place for morality or ethics in a a world as painted by schopenhauer welfare as you know schopenhauer insists that as there's one ultimate ultimate reality and each one of us is identical with that one ultimate reality therefore in a some sense we're all one ultimately and he uses that for advocating um compassion sympathy um agape love is distinct from erotic love i mean um sitting from arrows well all the more power to his elbow i mean necessarily noble that he should uphold that idea of compassion and so on it's difficult to see how each one of us is an embodiment of that horrible reality that there's much room for mutual love i mean the conflict will be more like it i should have thought but anyway he certainly undoubtedly values love against hatred and um compassion rather than cruelty and so on i certainly don't want to question those valuations of chauvinis from it but ultimately of course is where all the ultim one will and the will is something horrible the ultimate ideal can only be turning against the ultimate reality i'd like to keep these two notions separate uh for the moment and before we move on to his idea of turning against reality i'd like just to say a little more about the about his view of morals and ethics because it was in a sense applied metaphysics in a rather unusual sense for a philosopher he had as you say this metaphysical view that we were all ultimately one and again that is in common with some religions and therefore that that in doing you an injury i am in some significant ultimate sense injuring myself and that my ultimate oneness with you is really the basis of morality the basis of compassion the basis of empathy it's why i should behave towards you in morally approved ways and not behave towards you in aggressive ways and you were quite right to say that there's an apparent conflict between regarding the metaphysical the ultimate metaphysical reality is awful and evil and nightmarish in the way we were talking about a few moments ago and regarding it in this context as the basis of compassion empathy and morality in general i would like at this point to say that that the famous fact value distinction applies as much to schopenhauer in my opinion as it does to anyone else that is to say that you can accept his view or a great deal of his view about how things are about what reality is without accepting his evaluation of it or taking up his stance towards it uh and i say that with feeling because in fact it it i'm an example i i think of this i mean i do regard very large parts of sherpanhar's philosophy by no means all of it but large parts of it i regard as being valid and as having enormously rare and important and genuinely deep insights and i think it casts great illumination but i'm not a pessimist in schopenhauer's sense at all in other words i accept his picture of the way things are to an important degree but i don't at all take up his view of it all as being a nightmare or you know whatever it may be so i would go along with the with the ethics of chopina in fact i think his ethics is very well funded and wouldn't want to as it were keep that part of his philosophy with which it's in conflict as we know a good many philosophers now question the fact value distinction i wouldn't wish to i think it has a in indispensable use myself because we must distinguish for example between the way in which people behave and the way in which they ought or not to behave the two propositions different types that's perfectly obvious on the other hand i don't think myself that one can have any interpretation of the world that doesn't contain value judgments value judgments of importance of significance and so on and any more than you can have a history that goes beyond mere um chronology and that really tells a significant coherent story you can have you can't have a history without uh without value judgments i don't believe in value through free history or value-free metaphysics so i i would be although i'm willing to accept some distinction um i'd be very careful about um applying it myself and simply saying well we can have this interpretation of the world on the one hand which is value free and then the set of evaluations on the other because i don't think things work out in quite that way you know no i don't think they work out in quite that way either um uh i was merely making the point that you could share you could have a lot of chopin and i was always careful not to say all but only a lot of schopenhauer's view of the way things are without sharing his value judgments i would have other judgments and i would entirely agree with you that you can't have a view with no value judgments i think that's i think that's absolutely correct um but now uh let us uh move on as it were to the final stage of schopenhauer's philosophy when he taking his value judgment seeing that reality in all its manifest or in most of its manifestations is an evil a frightening a nightmarish thing the final step in his philosophy which some have embraced and others have found impossible even to understand sometimes is he says we must reject this ultimately we must reject reality we must deny reality the famous denial of the will can you perhaps try and explain a little more about what's involved in that concept well i'd say that um if you turn well because here he entirely approved of the asceticism self-mortification and so on that one can find in in several of the world religions advocated in iraq and practiced in the past and um that he thought that that was constituted a stage on the way towards the kind of final rejection of the will i don't quite know what form that would take but it would take the for i suppose the form of an entry into a buddhist nirvana interpreted as nothingness well schopenhauer would say that may possibly have qualities of which we know nothing and can know nothing but as far as we're concerned to turn against the the the ultimate reality as we form a conception of it is to turn to um nothing it's the non-existence that's why i would say that in spite of all the real resemblances between say christianity buddhism and schopenhauer's philosophy there is a fundamental difference between his attitude and say that of the christian the muslim and the orthodox jew because it as they believe in in god they certainly wouldn't regard it as desirable that one should chuck a god overboard or deny the ultimate reality in that sense so there it seems to me there is a there is a gulf but but but more important because people might sweep that aside and say well i'm neither a christian nor a muslim nor a jew but even in terms of schopenhauer's own philosophy i don't see how it's possible to turn against the will because it's the will that has to deny itself i am the will and uh if this ultimate reality is going to deny it how can it deny itself um in and through me it can't produce nothingness exactly i don't see how i i i find it better the more i think about it the more difficult i find to to envisage that ultimate rejection of the will is taking place when the will itself has got to do it let us before we finish this discussion i'd like us to say a word or two about schopenhauer's influence on other people he's had enormous influence on creative artists and i referred to that i didn't name any but one might name wagner an enormous influence uh tergenev an enormous influence in fact lots of major novelists of the last hundred years uh conrad thomas hardy proust thomas mann but perhaps in a discussion which is about philosophy what we ought to concentrate on is not that so much as his influence on other major thinkers and i think three stand out in importance nietzsche freud and wittgenstein as having in chronological orders having been very obviously and strikingly influenced by schopenhauer between his day and ours could you perhaps say something about his influence on nietzsche as you know nietzsche um regarded uh schopenhauer as an educator and his early work as schopenhauer's educator indicates i think that he thought of um schopenhauer as a man who wasn't content with the superficial view of things but looked underneath and wasn't afraid to look the world in history in in the face and didn't try and gloss over everything as leibniz did was talk about the best of all possible worlds but uh really looked the world in the face and um it was therefore a man of mental integrity he also entirely agreed with chauvin her subordination of intellect to will in its first instance the servant of the will and um also i think he regarded chopin as a man of great independence of character who didn't uh allow himself to be his views to be dictated by society or but thought them out or by his predecessors for the matter of that or other philosophers but thought them out for himself he i think but he came of course to criticize as you know um uh schopenhauer in the course of time for his turning away from life and uh although it's been said of nietzsche by professor crane brinton the great yay sayer spent most of his life saying no um nietzsche did officially uphold the affirming of the world as it is and um in a way i i sympathize with nietzsche because i think if the world is as chopin how acidic is then the best thing is to try and um alter it for the better i don't say that nietzsche well he thought i mean i wouldn't agree with nietzsche's idea of what would be for the better but um i i there i am i do agree with nietzsche but on the other hand he never ceased to admire chopin her and revere him as a man who set him on the right path away from convention it would be a great question i think well i think we must now turn finally to the latest of the great thinkers who was directly influenced by schopenhauer namely wittgenstein and perhaps you'd like to conclude this discussion by saying a little about schopenhauer's influence on wittgenstein thank you yes well of course that's quite um clear isn't it i mean from the preparatory the material preparatory to the tractators in the notebooks and in the other manuscripts the debt of wittgenstein to chopin has made quite clear and in the tractatus itself this idea to which you referred earlier in our conversation of the correlation between the subject and my world that is strong in in wittgenstein the um that this i and my world and that the eye the epistemological subject is as it were the boundary of my world it's not an object in my world and because if i try to think of myself then there's the eye that's trying to think of myself but it's on the borderline as it were of the world that comes straight out of schopenhauer then the famous saying in the tractatus that if all the problems of science were onset the problems of life wouldn't have been touched that also really comes from schopenhauer i think and it's also noteworthy that in the tractatus wittgenstein makes a distinction between the will is the bearer of ethics of which he says nothing can really be said that's the metaphenominal well and the will as a phenomenon which is really the forms part of the subject matter of psychology rather than the philosophy for for the author the tractators and um therefore there is that distinction between the metaphysical will i think the metaphenominal will and a phenomenal will which also can be traced i think to schopenhauer the i should say that wittgenstein the course of time became less and less chopin harian the sense that he became less and less addicted to um forming a system whereas as you said much earlier schopenhauer was certainly a system builder uh there is a kind of embryo system in the trachtas but there's very little as we all know in the later writings of wittgenstein and um but still he undoubtedly was strongly influenced by schopenhauer in fact he's about the only major philosopher of the past it was no sense contemporary that wittgenstein had really read and studied and digested at all i think um so um it shows that the influence of schopenhauer by no means ended with the 19th century but as you said earlier it slipped down into the 20th century and is embodied in one of the most famous philosophers of our century in time thank you very much professor copeland

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Keywords: History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Ontology, Philosophy Overdose, Metaphysics, Social Philosophy, Schopenhauer, Bryan Magee, Kant, Immanuel Kant, Subject-Object, Interview, Idealism, Transcendental Idealism, Pessimism, Freud, Consciousness, Unconscious, Thing-in-itself, World as Will and Representation, Kantian, Meaninglessness, Absurd, Subjectivity, Frederick Copleston, Atheism, Philosophy, Western Philosophy, The Will, Death, Meaning, Nihilism, Existence

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Length: 43min 28sec (2608 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 07 2022