PHILOSOPHY - Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German 19th century philosopher who deserves to be remembered today for the insights contained in his great work the world as will and representation Schopenhauer was the first serious Western philosopher to get interested in Buddhism and his thought can best be read as a Western reinterpretation and response to the enlightened pessimism found in Buddhist thought in my seventeenth year he wrote in an autobiographical text I was gripped by the misery of life as the Buddha had been in his youth when he saw sickness old age pain and death everywhere the truth was that this world could not have been the work of an all-loving being but rather that of a devil who'd brought creatures into existence in order to delight in their sufferings and like the Buddha it was Schopenhauer's goal to dissect and then come up with a solution to this suffering it's simply the fault of universities that Schopenhauer has always been taught in such a dry academic way that it has stopped him from being widely known read and followed and yet in truth this is a man who no less than the Buddha deserves disciples schools artworks and monasteries to put his ideas into practice it's not too late sure but how his philosophy starts by giving a name to a primary force within us which he says is more powerful than anything else our reasoned logic or moral sense and which Schopenhauer terms the will to life in German the villa zum Libin the will to life is a constant force which makes us thrust ourselves forward cling to existence and look always to our own advantage it's blind dumb and very insistent what the will to life makes us focus on most of all is sex from adolescence onwards this will thrums within us turns our heads constantly to erotic scenarios and makes us do very weird things the most weird of which is fall in love all the time Schopenhauer was very respectful of love as one might be towards a hurricane or a tiger he deeply resented the disruption caused to intelligent people by infatuations or what called crushes but he refused to conceive of these as either disproportionate or accidental in his eyes love is connected to the most important underlying project of the will to life and hence of all of our lives having children while all this noise and fuss about love he asked why all the urgency uproar anguish and exertion because the ultimate aim of all love affairs is actually more important than all other aims in anyone's life and therefore it's quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it the romantic dominates life because Schopenhauer wrote what is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation the existence and special constitution of the human race in times to come of course we rarely think of future children when we're asking someone out on a date but in Schopenhauer's view this is simply because the intellect remains much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will why should such deception be necessary because for Schopenhauer we would never reliably to reproduce unless we at first quite literally lost our minds this was a man deeply opposed to the boredom routine expense and sheer sacrifice of having children furthermore Schopenhauer argued that most of the time if our intellect were properly in charge of choosing who we could fall in love with we would pick very different people to the ones we actually end up with but we're ultimately driven to fall in love not with anyone we'll just get on with well but with people whom the will to life recognizes as ideal partners for the project of producing what Schopenhauer bluntly called balanced children all of us are a little bit unbalanced ourselves he thought were a bit too masculine or too feminine too tall or too short too rational or too impulsive if such imbalances were allowed to persist or were aggravated in the next generation the human race would within a short time sink into oddity the will to life must therefore push us towards people who can on account of their compensating imbalances cancel out our own issues a large nose combined with a button nose promise of perfect nose he argued that short people often fall in love with tall people more feminine men with more assertive and masculine women unfortunately this theory of balancing attraction led Schopenhauer to a very bleak conclusion namely that a person who is highly suitable for producing a balanced child with is almost never that we can't realize it at the time because we've been blindfolded by the will to life very suitable for us we should not be surprised he wrote by marriages between people who would never have been friends love casts itself on people who apart from sex would be hateful contemptible and even abhorrent to us the will to life's ability to further its own ends rather than our happiness may Schopenhauer implied be sent with particular clarity in that rather scary lonely moment just after orgasm he wrote directly after copulation that devil's laughter is heard watching the human spectacle Schopenhauer felt deeply sorry for us we're all just like animals except because of our greater self-awareness far more unhappy than animals there are some poignant passages where Schopenhauer discusses the lives of different animals but he dwells especially on the mole a stunted monstrosity his words that dwells in damp narrow corridors rarely sees the light of day and whose offspring look like gelatinous worms but which still does everything in its power to survive and perpetuate itself we're just like moles and just as pitiful we are driven frantically to push ourselves forward we want to get good jobs to impress prospective partners we wander endlessly about finding the one and are eventually briefly seduced by someone just long enough to produce a child and then have to spend the next 40 years in misery with them to atone for our errors Schopenhauer was always beautifully and comically gloomy about human nature there is only one inborn error he wrote and that's the notion that we exist in order to be happy so long as we persist in this inborn error the world will seem to us full of contradictions for it every step in great things and small we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of being happy that's why the faces of almost all elderly people are deeply etched with disappointment Schopenhauer offers two solutions to deal with the problems of existence the first solution is intended for rather rare individuals that he called sages sages are able by heroic efforts to rise above the demands of the will to life they see the natural drives within themselves towards selfishness sex and vanity and override them they overcome their desires live alone often away from big cities never marry and can quell their appetites for fame and status in Buddhism Schopenhauer points out this person is known as a monk but he recognizes that only a tiny number of us in any generation will ever go in for such a life the second and more easily available in realistic therapy is to spend as long as we can with art and philosophy whose task is to hold up a mirror to the frenzied efforts and unhappy turmoil created in all of us by the will to life we may not be able to quell the will to life very often but in the evenings at the theater or on a walk with a book of poetry we can step back from the day-to-day and look at life without illusion the art Schopenhauer loved best is the opposite of sentimental Greek tragedies the aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld and the political theory of Machiavelli such works speak frankly about egoism suffering selfishness and the horrors of married life and extend a tragic dignified melancholy sympathy to the human race it's fitting that Schopenhauer's own work fitted his description of what philosophy and art should do for us it too is deeply console and it's morbid bitter pessimism for example he tells us to marry means to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other every life history is the history of suffering life has no intrinsic worth but is kept in motion merely by desire and illusion after spending a lot of time trying yet failing to be famous and trying yet failing to have good relationships towards the end of his life Schopenhauer did eventually find an audience who adored his writings he lived quietly in an apartment in Frankfurt with his dog a white poodle whom he called Atman after the world so loved the Buddhists but whom the neighboring children less respectfully referred to as mrs. Schopenhauer shortly before his death a sculptor made a Fame bust of him he died in 1860 at the age of 72 having achieved calm and serenity he is a sage for our own times someone whose bust should be no less widespread and no less revered than that of the Buddha he so loved you

Channel: The School of Life

Views: 2,054,867

Rating: 4.9184055 out of 5

Keywords: the school of life, love, life, wisdom, TSOL, big questions, curriculum, secular, Arthur Schopenhauer (Author), wonder, sermon, education, philosophy, mood, school, relationships, improvement, interest, SOL, self, alain de botton, London, thought, talk, think, lecture

Id: q0zmfNx7OM4

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/ThaBenMan]

Ah yes - when the moaning and slap of flesh on flesh from the porn becomes irritating, and you close the window in disgust...

[u/paulfromatlanta]

it's when we realize we're slaves to a biological imperative uncaring of our happiness.

Guess my biological imperative is to go to sleep...

[u/Aroclor]

Doesn't matter, had sex.

[u/FailureToReport]

More like Devils Clarity, that moment is when you need to reflect on shit. You'd be amazed how quickly you realize a relationship is a terrible idea after you have an orgasm and aren't chasing it. Seriously, do it. I'll wait.

[u/v923]

The Japanese call it "Kenjataimu"

[u/NJNeal17]

My favorite YouTube channel! The School of Life

[u/liabach]

THe chicks dig his pillow talk.

[u/Just1morefix]

Except if you are jacking off, in that case you are completely stepping outside of the parameters of sociobiology and the biological imperative. Every time you rub one out or use birth control you are thumbing your nose at the innate sexual drive that makes us unconscious meat replicators for DNA. So we are driven by the procreative urgings, until we make a conscious choice to not be. Sexuality will always be powerful and override many of our activities. It is one of our prime motivators, but you can avoid being a slave to its ultimate goal.

[u/Captain--Fabulous]

I call it nutgret, because it's regret but after you nut