SCHOPENHAUER Explained: The World as Will and Representation (ALL PARTS)

schopenhauer's philosophy begins where the philosophy of emmanuel kant ends in fact in the forward to the world as will and representation schopenhauer makes the explicit demand of the reader to acquaint himself with the kantian philosophy in order to firmly understand schopenhauer it is therefore necessary to quickly reiterate the main points of kant's philosophy in particular we'll discuss what schopenhauer calls khan's greatest accomplishment consider the world we tend to think that what we see is what we get in the sense that we believe that the world as we perceive it is the world as it really is when you see a tree you assume that the tree is actually there in an objective sense you don't believe you're dreaming or hallucinating in other words you believe in a real objective reality and you believe your senses give you reliable information on the nature of that reality the accomplishment of kant exists in showing that this is not the case your knowledge of the tree is mediated not immediate what this means is that the image of the tree as you perceive it is not pure it has passed through the filter of your mind so to speak khan's accomplishment was to show that there is no black and white distinction between subjects that is you the perceiving agent and object the tree that you're seeing the subject is an active agent and not just a passive observer what does this mean it means that your perception of the world is shaped by your mind the three major tools your mind uses to make the image you see are space time and causality let's take a step back and see what is really said here because it's important to understand kant is saying that time and space are not properties of the things in themselves your mind receives raw data goes to work and delivers a picture molded in the forms of space and time in other words space and time are not properties of objective reality the mind plays an active role in shaping your perception of the world like a filter it adds a layer of reality to make the raw data intelligible in terms of time and space so what does this objective reality without time and space then look like now there's the rub because there is no way to know why because you're a human with a human mind you can never perceive things objectively because you will always be a subject you cannot escape your mind and perceive the world independent of it by virtue of you being a subject true objectivity is impossible for example consider the following thought experiments imagine a world without humans what does this look like maybe you're thinking of a desert but the image in your mind is still from your perspective as a human to imagine a world without humans a world without perceiving subjects is impossible because you cannot escape your own mind the material world is contingent upon there being a subject in other words there is no object without a subject in khan's own words if i take away the thinking subject the whole material world must vanish as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject and is a species of this subjects representations for schopenhauer this is khan's greatest accomplishment the discovery of the following truth there is no object without a subject objective reality is not as objective as you think but where does this leave us what can we hope to discover about this strange objective reality this reality without subjects can we know anything about how the world really is without the meddling of our own mind in other words is truly metaphysical knowledge possible in our thought experiment we have shown how it's impossible to escape from the mind so to speak and to take in a truly objective viewpoint this is why according to kant knowledge of the world as it really is is impossible this leaves us stranded we can never look beyond the limits of our mind and take a peek behind the curtain of the material world schopenhauer however disagrees schopenhauer discovered the single narrow door to the truth part 2 the narrow door this is schopenhauer's starting point like kant he believes there can be no object without a perceiving subject but unlike kant he believes that objective metaphysical knowledge is possible after all how consider your body schopenhauer notices a strange duality in how humans perceive their own bodies on the one hand we experience our body as an object among objects that is to say i can look at my hands or my arm in the way a sculptor or a biologist might look at it in this way of looking at things my hand is not that different from the glass of water on my desk both are objects of the material world situated in time and space of course that's not a whole story because on the other hand i can feel my body i feel as if i live in it this body is mine i can command its movements feel its pain notice its hunger notice its thirst in this way my body is not just one object among many in this way my body is really mine a unique object one of its kind in short the body reveals itself to us in two distinct ways the first way as an object among objects is what schopenhauer calls representation the second way in which we feel as if we live in our bodies the way in which we feel hunger and pain and love this way he calls will so we say that our body appears to us both as well and as representation the fact that the body appears to us as well is what schopenhauer called the narrow door to the truth because when we've established that the body is both will and representation we must immediately ask ourselves the question what about the rest of the world could it be that just like my body the rest of the world is also both will and representation there are two possible answers to this question either my body and my body alone is a completely unique object in the universe it would be the only object that is both will and representation for schopenhauer this leads to a kind of theoretical egoism the belief that only i exist and that the rest of the world is mere fancy but this is not a tenable option for schopenhauer theoretical egoism can never be demonstrably refuted yet in philosophy it has never been used otherwise than as a skeptical sophism i.e a pretense as a serious conviction on the other hand it could only be found in a mad house and as such it stands in need of a cure rather than a refutation rather we must go with the other option the entire world must be will not just my own body my body is not unique it is as much will as the rest of the universe is will the only difference is that it's impossible for me to experience the will of the world while it is possible for me to experience the will of my own body schopenhauer's narrow door to the truth is this to infer from the intimate knowledge of our own body the existence of a will at work throughout the entire universe what can we say about this will first we can say what a will is not recall how following emmanuel kant time space and causality fall in the domain of the representation in other words concepts like time and space are not applicable to the will the will is simply not the kind of thing that has a time and a space this is impossible for a reason to comprehend in the sense that we literally cannot imagine a spaceless timeless thing but that's why the will outside of the small glimpse we experience through our bodies is necessarily foreign to us if the will is spaceless and timeless then it follows that the will is undifferentiated in time and space what does this mean to use a metaphor it means that the will is one in the domain of the will there are no different things multiplicity the existence of multiple things is not applicable to the will because multiplicity requires a spatial element of the will schopenhauer says it is free from all multiplicity although its manifestations in time and space are innumerable it is itself one though not in the sense in which an object is one for the unity of an object can only be known in opposition to a possible multiplicity nor yet in a sense in which a concept is one for the unity of a concept originates only in abstraction from a but it is one as that which lies outside time and space the principium individuations i.e the possibility of multiplicity only when all this has become quite clear to us through the subsequent examination of the phenomena and different manifestations of the will shall we fully understand the meaning of the county and doctrine that time space and causality do not belong to the thing in itself but are only forms of knowing this idea is extremely important because in its consequences we will find the basis for schopenhauer's ethics but for now schopenhauer invites us to look at the world around us knowing that beneath it all lies a strange mysterious will he invites us to look at the world with his new knowledge in the back of our heads after looking inwards we are now asked to look outwards part 3 the will in nature up until this point schopenhauer's observations have been of a theoretical nature schopenhauer has shown that a strange mysterious will lies hidden beneath all of nature from the loftiest galaxies to the simplest blade of grass at this point schopenhauer wants to discuss the characteristics of this will in order to do so it's necessary to abandon theoretical arguments and take a look at the world as it shows itself to us in other words it's time to go from a theoretical to an empirical point of view schopenhauer looks at the world in a scientific manner and tries to uncover fundamental principles that show its inner workings the world as will and representation is full of examples of such empirical observations he makes two important observations first that the world is full of suffering in a particularly grim passage he tells us the story of explorer junghan who relates that he saw on the island of java a plane as far as the eye could reach entirely covered with skeletons and took it for a battlefield they were however merely the skeletons of large turtles which come this way out of the sea in order to lay their eggs and are then attacked by wild dogs who with their united strength lay them on their backs strip off the small shell of the stomach and so devour them alive but often then a tiger pounces upon the dogs now all this misery repeats itself thousands and thousands of times year out year in for this then these turtles are born for whose guilt must they suffer this torment wherefore the whole scene of horror human history is the tale of one bloody conflict leading to another even plants suffer a great deal for their entire lives revolve around the struggle for sunlight schopenhauer's first observation namely that to exist means to suffer stands in sharp contrast to his second observation namely all that exists wants to live schopenhauer notes very much ahead of his time that procreation and self-preservation seem to be the chief occupations of all that lives that may sound obvious today but remember schopenhauer wrote his major work some 40 years before darwin published on the origin of species and almost an entire century before the age of freud because of this observed struggle for procreation and self-preservation schopenhauer will sometimes speak of the will to life instead of simply of the will it should be remembered however that the will to life is not simply a motivation of living beings but that the will encompasses all of reality even inorganic matter such as rocks and rivers it's just that in the organic world these motivations are most clearly seen so this is the world according to schopenhauer a veil of tears unending suffering suffering that is in part created by ourselves in our vain attempts to prolong life because after all do we not cause the suffering when we eat plants or animals just as the lion kills the gazelle to stay alive but why must this be the case at this point schopenhauer has merely observed the suffering of the world and not explained it if his philosophy of the will is to really be a metaphysical explanation of the world then the will must explain why the world is as it is and that's exactly what schopenhauer does remember how in part two we discussed how the will is undifferentiated in time and space in other words how the will is won what this means is that beyond the illusory world of the representation beyond the world as we ordinarily experience it there is no you or me no here or there no this no that there is just will and nothing else in the domain of the will that is to say on the deepest most fundamental level all of existence is one big whole this is because as we've seen the will is beyond time and beyond space so why is there suffering in the world because there is multiplicity instead of unity the world as representation which comes into existence with a perceiving subject divides the unified world of the will into the categories of object and subject first and in the categories of time space and causality second in the domain of the will there are no different things and therefore no conflicts because where would the conflict be there is simply will and nothing else it's only in the representation that is to say in the world of our experience that conflict can rise because now there is a you versus a me a wolf versus rabbit hunter versus prey but deep down beyond the illusion of the representation we are one and the same a great undivided whole the biggest mistake says schopenhauer is that we are not aware of this basic truth therefore with the same necessity with which the stone falls to the earth the hungry wolf buries its fangs in the flesh of its prey without the possibility of the knowledge that it is itself the destroyed as well as the destroyer the fundamental truth can be restated as follows there is no you and the world on a fundamental level you in the world are one and the same there is no principle of individuation schopenhauer is fond of using the latin term principium individualis that separates you from the world all is one this is the basic idea of schopenhauer's metaphysics of course now that you know this the question arises what do we do in other words it's time to discuss ethics schopenhauer's ethics in the previous video we talked about how schopenhauer builds an entire metaphysical system taking both and our own bodies as a starting point we discussed how in schopenhauer's metaphysics the world appears to us as both will and representation we also saw how schopenhauer concluded that the world as will must be undivided in space and time in other words he showed how the world is one the tragedy of our existence in the representation is that we fail to see this fundamental oneness of the universe if you want to learn more about schopenhauer's metaphysics i suggest you watch the previous video in this series to really understand schopenhauer's ethics you need at least a basic grip of the way he views the world but for this video we're focusing our attention on ethics we have seen that the world according to schopenhauer is fundamentally one but as human beings we can't help but see multiplicity we can't help but see individual trees rocks rivers animals humans so the big question is what do we do there are two answers to this question we will discuss both of them schopenhauer identifies two paths readers of his philosophy can take ideally these two parts will melt together into one but we'll get to that for now let's focus on the first path compassion the first commandment in chopin howery in ethics is thou shalt have compassion why remember how we said that the world on a fundamental level is one there is no you or i we just think there is so it follows when you hurt your fellow man you are actually hurting yourself and not just in a spiritual lovey-dovey kind of way but in a very real metaphysical sense showing compassion means you recognize this fundamental truth we're all in this together because we're all the same life is suffering but i feel you because you are me in fact the german word for compassion meet light literally means to suffer with to suffer together schopenhauer goes as far as to say that compassion or sympathy is identical with pure love for which he also likes to use the greek and biblical term agape which is a kind of selfless divine love opposed to eros which is sexual or erotic love which is fundamentally selfish in nature all true and pure love is sympathy and all love which is not sympathy is selfishness eros is selfishness agape is sympathy for schopenhauer selfishness is the root of all evil it is the opposite of compassion the selfish person denies the fundamental truth of the universe the selfish person acts as if he himself and the other are different beings when in fact they are one and the same in this way the selfish person inflicts cruelty on the other without realizing he is hurting himself by maintaining the illusion of the principium individualis the selfish person is directly responsible for the suffering of the world we see how the virtue of compassion is the direct consequence of knowledge of the will this is the first path the reader of schopenhauer can take once you realize how the world is fundamentally won the need to be compassionate is obvious you're not just nice towards other people you're nice towards yourself however there is another path a much more demanding one this is the path of asceticism asceticism is the voluntary practice of extreme self-discipline and denying oneself sensual pleasures such as food and sex this is schopenhauer's famous doctrine of the denial of the will it is the next step in fully realizing schopenhauer's fundamental truth the will is the cause of all suffering in the world therefore the most ethical step to take is to deny that will the will to life constantly pushes us towards gratification of our base animal desires for food sex and pleasure but by affirming the will in this manner you become complicit and perpetuating the suffering of the world if that veil of maya the principium individuations is lifted from the eyes of a man to such an extent that he no longer makes the egotistical distinction between his person and that of others but takes as much interest in the suffering of other individuals as in his own and therefore is not only benevolent in the highest degree but even ready to sacrifice his own individuality whenever such a sacrifice will save a number of other persons then it clearly follows that such a man who recognizes in all beings his own inmost and true self must also regard the infinite suffering of all suffering beings as his own and take on himself the pain of the whole world asceticism is simply the next step in ethics to be compassionate is one thing but to recognize the fundamental truth on a deep level it at once becomes clear that the path of the ascetic is the one to take he sees wherever he looks suffering humanity the suffering brute creation and a world that passes away but all this now lies as near him as his own person lies to the egoist why should he now with such knowledge of the world assert this very life through constant acts of will and thereby bind himself ever more closely to it press it ever more firmly to himself but what is asceticism in a practical sense it's deviously simple the aesthetic is chased he does not eat for pleasure in fact he does nothing for pleasure he does not pursue any kind of sensual gratification and above all the ascetic does not have children having children means you continue the suffering of the world in the highest degree because you add yet another individual into the world who will be condemned to suffer but luckily schopenhauer realizes this isn't ideal it simply asks too much of people schopenhauer realizes only a tiny fraction of humans will ever fulfill this ascetic ideal his historical examples are scarce jesus christ the buddha saint francis of assisi and anonymous indian and christian monks asceticism is the ideal of the saint and it is extremely rare and extremely demanding therefore for the average person schopenhauer insists on compassion just start with being kind towards your fellow human beings and your fellow animals this is the essence of schopenhauer in ethics first compassion second asceticism his ethics are deceptively simple they're not the result of complex rational thought or commandments from a deity schopenhauer's ethics are the immediate result of his metaphysics they are crystal clear to whoever understands his metaphysical thoughts and because this way of life the life of a monk has been promoted for centuries by both christians and brahmans schopenhauer felt vindicated that at last he had found the eternal truth of the universe he believed that with his philosophy he laid bare the truth that humans have always known but had a hidden behind religious allegories and metaphors schopenhauer believed he showed us in the rational clear language of philosophy what the ancient religions tried to teach through metaphor and allegory in this sense schopenhauer believed he had solved philosophy and answered its two biggest questions what can we know and what can we do schopenhauer finishes his masterpiece the world as will and representation as follows thus in this way by contemplation of the life and conduct of saints whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own experience but who are brought before our eyes by the written history and with the stamp of inner truth by art we must banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal and which we fear as children fear the dark we must not even evade it like the indians through myths and meaningless words such as reabsorption in brahma or the nirvana of the buddhists rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing but conversely to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself this our world which is so real with all its suns and milky ways is nothing aesthetics the general question of aesthetics is what is beauty yet as we'll see a solid understanding of schopenhauer's metaphysical theory is necessary in order to understand what schopenhauer means when he says beautiful going forward this video will assume at least a basic grasp of schopenhauer's theory of the will with that disclaimer out of the way let's dive in part 1 the need for art as always when discussing schopenhauer we need to keep in mind one thing at all times life is suffering and the world is a hell for whence did dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world and yet he made a very proper hell of it and when on the other hand he came to the task of describing heaven and its delights he had an insurmountable difficulty before him for our world affords no materials at all for this why is this important because this is where art comes in schopenhauer's theory of aesthetics is actually very simple art allows us to forget the suffering of the world in the aesthetic contemplation which is another way of saying when enjoying a good piece of art we temporarily forget ourselves for a brief moment the artwork takes us out of this world out of this hell for a brief moment in which we enjoy simple beauty without being reminded of the suffering that plagues ourselves and the world around us aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists in great measure in the fact that in entering the state of pure contemplation we are lifted for the moment above all willing i.e all wishes and cares we become as it were freed from ourselves this is the case because as humans we are creatures of both will and reason what happens when we lose ourselves and a good piece of art is we temporarily forget that we are willing creatures and as we saw in previous videos the will the desire is the cause of all suffering we forget about the will because what happens when we enjoy art is that our reason takes over our reason takes the light and enjoying art because art is the domain of reason being that art is the earthly representation of a platonic idea schopenhauer uses the term platonic idea to drive home the point that artwork tries to recreate necessarily imperfectly an ideal form of a thing when for example an artist paints a hand he tries to paint the perfect hand the perfect hand of course does not exist in the material world it only exists in an abstract manner as an idea yet the more the artist approaches that ideal the more beautiful his artwork becomes after all the talk of khan's metaphysical system after all the talk of objects and subjects and things in themselves and will it might strike you as strange for schopenhauer to suddenly introduce platonic ideas to the mix but platonic ideas for schopenhauer constitute an important part of his metaphysics the platonic idea is will not yet become representation the platonic idea is an intermediate step it hovers so to speak between pure will and between representation the platonic idea is the primeval form the platonic idea is necessarily object something known a representation and in that respect is different from the thing in itself i.e the will but in that respect only it has merely laid aside the subordinate forms of the phenomenon or rather it has not yet assumed them but it has retained the first and most universal form that of the representation in general the form of being object for a subject in a good artwork therefore our reason is delighted in contemplating the platonic idea the world of abstractions in other words a world that is far removed from the world of our day-to-day lives the world of reason as opposed to the world of representation we enjoy escaping even for just a moment this evil world of representation with all its suffering and multiplicity and we delight in contemplating the platonic form of things it gives us repose it allows us quite literally to lose ourselves behind all the verbose language and arguments and descriptions however we must never forget what is actually being said what schopenhauer has just explained in logical intelligible language is nothing more and nothing less than the completely ordinary experience we all have of enjoying art it is schopenhauer's attempt at explaining that feeling you get when you're at the museum any painting grabs your attention you stare at it and you feel like you get lost in it part two the sublime there is however another kind of aesthetic experience this kind is not concerned with man-made art but with the beauty and splendor of nature the aesthetic contemplation of nature can go beyond simple artistic pleasure in an experience of the sublime of the overwhelming force of beauty and constancy of nature schopenhauer says we can learn more about ourselves have you ever been completely in awe of a mountain view a sunset or even a lightning storm if so you might have experienced the sublime in witnessing the majesty of nature you feel small insignificant but more importantly according to schopenhauer it's a reminder of your own mortality as opposed to undying nature you might perish but nature will not the mountains will always be there towering above this is a very powerful feeling and you can get lost in it the person who is so enraptured by nature forgets himself temporarily forgets he even inhabits a body temporarily forgets his own individuality it is a moment of enlightenment not unlike that of the ascetic this person suddenly and violently realizes that he is the world and that the world is him whoever now has become so absorbed and lost in the perception of nature becomes in this way directly conscious that as such he is the condition that is the supporter of the world and all objective existence for this now shows itself as dependent upon his existence thus he draws nature into himself so that he sees it to be merely an accident of his own being in this sense byron says are not the mountains waves and skies a part of me and of my soul as i of them the sublime contemplation is another way of arriving at schopenhauer's fundamental truth that there is no difference between yourself and the world but that all is one part three music for schopenhauer music is the most perfect art form in fact it stands lonely at the top leaving the rest of the arts such as literature painting and sculpture far behind where does this primacy of music come from for the purpose of illustration we'll compare music to painting but of course the larger point is equally valid for the other arts such as literature and sculpture what does the painter try to do as we have discussed in the first part of this video it's the painter's job to recreate the platonic idea as faithfully as possible what does this mean it means the painter takes a look at the world let's say he sees a beautiful sunset and then he tries to translate his impression of the sunset onto the canvas in other words the painter looks at reality and tries to make a faithful adaptation of it music is different music is not concerned with platonic ideas to grasp this just try to imagine what music looks like of music schopenhauer says it stands alone quite cut off from all the other arts in it we do not recognize the copy or repetition of any idea of existence in the world yet it is such a great and exceedingly noble art its effect on the inmost nature of man so powerful and it is so entirely and deeply understood by him in his inmost consciousness as a perfectly universal language the distinctness of which surpasses even that of the perceptible world itself music allows us to participate in the world as well similarly to the sublime experience music allows us to briefly lose ourselves completely this is because music uniquely among the arts is not a copy of a platonic idea not a copy of a representation but a copy of will itself music is by no means like the other arts the copy of the ideas but a copy of the will itself whose objectivity the ideas are this is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts for they speak only of the shadows but music speaks of the thing itself long before movies were a thing schopenhauer offers us here an explanation for the great power of the soundtrack this deep relation which music has to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any scene action event or surrounding seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it we might therefore just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will and this is the reason why music makes every picture and indeed every scene of real life end of the world at once appear with higher significance we perceive music only through time not through both space and time therefore it is one step further removed from the ordinary material world of the representation this is schopenhauer's metaphysical explanation for why we love music so much in a way music is not a part of this world and since this world is a hell music brings us closer to heaven conclusion art and the beauty of nature offer us a temporary escape from the sufferings of the world we enjoy art precisely for this reason the better the artwork the more we get lost in it the more we forget our surroundings the same is true of nature a mountain view makes us feel small it makes us forget our individuality and we can feel part of something bigger than ourselves part of nature part of the world part of the universe beautiful music likewise allows us to rise above our earthly existence and for a brief moment enjoy a higher state of being you

Channel: Weltgeist

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Length: 45min 1sec (2701 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020