Schopenhauer in 15 Minutes

[Music] schopener is known as a pessimistic philosopher uh he's probably best known for that trait although in truth you would say his works are really realistic rather than pessimistic he was born into a fairly well-to-do family uh in germany and his um active life was basically in the 19th century so being part of a well-to-do family he didn't really see the reality of the world very much until at the age of 15 his parents decided to take him on a trip around europe some of like in this trip to the buddha's experience when he left the palace and saw death and suffering and illness uh schopenhauer at the age of 15 was shocked to see how many people lived in the united kingdom in france in germany the places that he visited there's a lot of squalor death suffering illness and uh that impression that he got from that trip around europe stayed with him throughout his life and drove pretty much all his work and one of the things about schopenhauer is that the things he was thinking in his 20s he was still thinking about in his 60s so he was a very consistent philosopher there's several of his works whilst a few of his works were created when he was in his twenties so for example the four-fold root of the principle of sufficient reason yeah i know it's a mouthful uh was his doctoral dissertation but it's a very good uh document and he revisited it in his later life i think he was probably in his 60s and he uh he added to it but he didn't substantially change it so um what was chopin all about well the the major work he produced which is called the world as will and representation tells you pretty much everything the world as well well i'll get on to that in a moment but the world is representation uh schopenhauer saw himself as a um a kind of culmination of immanuel kant's work of bringing emmanuel kant's work into some kind of fruition now emmanuel kant has said that the world we know is a world of our representations there isn't really any green there isn't really any sweet taste to sugar there isn't really any such thing as a square or even time or space time and space are what can't consider to be the theater in which we experience life but not part of reality itself it's just like a framework if you like that we use our mind users to give us an experience of life and um chopin now saw the truth of that and so he he adapted um or adopted what kent had been saying that the world is a representation because it's a representation it's almost sort of like a dream and you need to understand that chopra now is very very heavily into eastern religion uh religious texts he got one of the first copies of the upanishads i think in europe and actually uh the upanishads was the defining document for chopin out anyway um he saw the world as a kind of dream i mean it's real enough you know if you get hit by a 40-ton truck then you're dead but nonetheless all of it is a representation so the world as representation now cantor said said that um the world we know is our own mental representation but we cannot know reality itself what he called the thing in itself and um chopina had one idea and he says in his book is his main work the world is willing representation which is in two volumes uh and is a couple of thousand or getting offered a couple of thousand pages long he said all he's trying to do is communicate one idea and that is that the world is will so it's not only representation kind of dream created by by our mind but it's will now the best way to explain this is that when you look at someone all they are to you is an object you know nothing about the inner uh nature of that person they're just you know an object in time and space the same if somebody's looking at you you are just an object for them but the thing you know is that within you you are driven by a will that will manifest itself through your never-ending desires for food sex comfort shelter you know whatever it is the thing that you're desiring at any particular moment in time fame wealth so as far as chopin hour is concerned the thing in it can't thing in itself reality itself was actually will so the world was will its inner nature and representation which was how we see it like on a movie screen the thing that is driving it all is will the way we experience it is kind of on a movie screen as a representation now uh chopin now produced the world as will and representation and i should just say this point some people call it world as will an idea and a recent translation says world as will and presentation well they all mean basically the same thing um he produced the first version fairly early in his life it was one volume and then he produced another volume later in life so there are two volumes to it the thing you need to know about schopener is that he was pretty well totally ignored by the community of philosophers at the time which must have been very hard for him and you can pick that up when you're reading his words because sometimes you'll complain about it uh he tried at the time of his um sort of early-ish career hegel was all the fashion so chopra now set up some lectures at university at the same time as hegel's he thought hegel was a windbag um i can't kind of tend to agree but anyway he thought hegel was a win back and uh everybody went to hegel's lectures nobody came to his lectures and he just he just never tried that again you know fortunately he was fairly uh well off didn't have to work for a living but um he never really again tried to get into academia in the way that most philosophers do as people who need to do something to earn a living anyway um he's a bit of a character there's a well uh well-known story of him trying to seduce some fairly young woman i think she was about 19 or 20 when he was about 50. and we know about this because it's reported in the journal or diary of this young woman chopin are taking taken her for a trip on the river and he taken a bunch of grapes and he handed her the grapes and while he wasn't looking she dropped them in the water and in her journal she says that disgusting old out gave me a bunch of crates but i dropped him in the water when he wasn't looking anyway he was a bit of a womanizer uh he liked his fine cigars but the world is willing representation has a fairly well i guess you could call it somber um note to it so he goes through how the world is representation how it is will and how this will is unconscious unconscionable uh pays no heed to the suffering of the creatures that are created through it or through the force that it manifests in life and that individual creatures are of no importance whatsoever as far as this wool is concerned he adopts the ideas of plato particularly the notion that nature is concerned about the species personally i'm not even sure that's the case but you know as far as chopra now is concerned nature is concerned with the species and we'll just bang out billions and billions of copies of the same thing or near enough the same thing just to get expression but the individual creature counts for nothing this means that individual creatures can suffer in all kinds of ways and there is no kind of alleviating factor so the very end of the world is will and representation he talks about the denial of the will to life the denial of this ruthless unconscious will to life which primarily manifests through the desire to exist continue with your existence and to procreate and he's a particular fan of buddhism and christianity says those are the two great pessimist religions well again yeah you could replace the world word pessimist with realistic he wasn't a fan of judaism and he wasn't a fan of islam so his conclusion was quite the opposite of nietzsche's nietzsche's was that the will to life is a glorious thing and we manifest it as best we can for schopenhauer the will to life is uh a pernicious thing it's something that creates sentient creatures and then has no regard for them so they suffer in all kinds of ways and so the highest a man can achieve is to deny this will to life that doesn't mean we commit suicide it just means that we deny the desires that are driving us all the time he you know chopin now didn't live like that and he said well you know it's only given for a few people to be able to do that but nonetheless that is the ultimate destiny for the highest kind of man to deny the will to life as i say he saw christianity as the perfect uh expression of that along with buddhism and um that's was his concluding idea about the whole of existence but in in reality it would be it would be better off uh certainly sentient creatures would be better off if it never bothered to manifest he did produce some other works he produced a few essays one on the nature of freedom i there is no such thing as free will another one on the nature of morality he produced some extensions of some further extensions to the world is when the representation which he published in uh some separate documents and towards the very end of his his life he started to get a little bit of recognition but you have to hand it to him to keep banging away at that all his life with no recognition and very few book sales is quite something and that was the defining thing about chopinella he was stubborn and fixed which served him well in that particular circumstance

Channel: Pessimist Philosophy

Views: 3,114

Rating: 4.9710145 out of 5

Keywords: Schopenhauer, Pessimism

Id: ErjBQ1QY3Lo

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020