Schopenhauer (In Our Time)

thanks for downloading the in our time podcast for more details about in our time and for our Terms of Use please go to BBC co uk the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig in eastern Germany in 1788 as a young man he wasn't lacking in confidence he argued with the great novelist Goethe and lambasted Hegel the predominant philosopher of the day his central idea was that everything in the world is fundamentally united by a will to live it's two key features are that it is infinite and meaningless and leads to boredom or suffering the only escape from this he argued comes from self denial or art pre-eminently music this pessimistic worldview carries Schopenhauer's influence well beyond philosophy his thinking marks the music of Richard Wagner and finds echoes in the work of Sigmund Freud Thomas Hardy and Albert Camus to discuss the philosophy Arthur Schopenhauer I'm joined by Antony grayling professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London Madras Han Pyle professor of philosophy at the University of Essex and Christopher Jana a professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton Antony grayling Schopenhauer came of age in the early 19th century Germany at that time the dominant philosopher in German is Hegel before we come to sharpen our can you give us a sense of Hegel and his hegemony a philosophy at the time well it's very chef and I was a young student in fact Hegel hadn't yet made a reputation but he did very soon after Jonah began his own work in philosophy this was ran about 1820 I suppose by which time Hegel was the professor of philosophy at Berlin the most prestigious philosophy appointment in Germany at the time and he drew enormous audiences to his lectures and his works which he had published in the preceding decade began to have a great influence on fortune Germany the thing about Hegel is that he had this tremendous system the Great's of totalizing system which purported to explain the unfolding of the world spirit through time and critic critics of Hegel's have suggested that what he had in mind was that the Prussian state and German culture of the first half of the 19th century was pretty near the summit of the unfolding of the world spirit this is something it's Schopenhauer very much disagreed with can you give us a rather more detail of Hegel's system of how the world spirit unfolded it's not use that at every moment as it were in the history of the world spirit there are internal contradictions to this the state of the spirits at that time or the state indeed of anything at that time and these internal contradictions have to be overcome by a forging of a new and higher version of itself as it were this is sometimes put not entirely accurately in terms of a thesis and antithesis and an emerging new synthesis out of it in fact Hegel didn't quite put it that way himself because he thought of these contradictions as being implicit or internal to a given state of things um so the idea is a dialectic of a movement forward into time with as it were an increasing value an increasing level of perfection moving always towards this final perfection which is the full realization of the spirit in history is he talking about the way ideas moved through time all the way actions lead to ideas that move through time well he applied this analysis to everything but but the the great point of it was this this idea of what he called the Geist which is the that worthy the true meaning of things we translate that as a spirit that it's that it's the fulfillment of that ultimately but everything could be thought of in this dialectic way even particular things can be thought of as being in a state of inner contradiction and needing this resolution by moving forward to a higher plane so of Hegel's philosophy and the power of the of the professor in german thought which is massively powerful and sharp and how is never going to be anywhere near reaching that state but it's also at that time there's a burgeoning Romantic movement which is anti enlightenment can you briefly tell us about that and how that played into the atmosphere or the thought of the time yes the Romantic movement especially in Germany at the end of the 18th century has to figure is one of the major I suppose country enlightenment movements because one of its premises was that reason by itself cannot be and shouldn't be regarded as their the that the dominating note in thinking about things but that there are other sources of authority over us as it might be beauty or nature or tradition or sentiment or even indeed the blood of the people and in different ways this expresses itself in poetry in writing and music but also of course in philosophy now I don't think anybody would willingly be without the poetry and the music that came out of Romanticism but Schopenhauer in particular tremendously disliked some of the Romantic impulses in the philosophy of the day so he heard lectures by people like v uh and Schelling and he was very of course aware of what Hegel was doing and he tended a little I think to lump them all together perhaps not entirely fairly as something which really required opposition because he felt it was moving philosophy in particular in the wrong direction Christian can you tell us about Chopin ah he's his family he was born into how it became a young aspiring philosopher in his late teens early twenties yes well he was born into a middle-class family his father was quite a successful merchant in dancing which was a free trading city and now Gdansk of course in Poland and his mother was actually a very successful literary figure in her own right later in life and was a bit of a mismatch between his parents which I think he later came to realize he was destined for a career in in business in trade in fact it said that his name Arthur or art or was selected because it was a kind of pan-european name that which would fit him for this role as a European businessman his father died when he was about 17 and it's thought that it was probably by suicide his father was ill and had a tendency to be rather depressed and melancholy which in fact was a tendency that Arthur himself seems to have inherited but this result of his father dying meant that over the next few years when he became of age he was free to do what he wanted and he entirely gave up the commercial career that he'd been destined for didn't he hurry didn't have money to make him rather in he did when he came I think when he became 21 he had quite a large fortune that he inherited his mother just let him have it and said quite it was quite liberal minded actually and said well you choose what you want to do in life and he decided he wanted the scholarly life enrolled at the University of göttingen and then later and moved on to Berlin as Antony said so he really just gave up his father's influence and I think it's been said that had his father not died early on he might never have gone into philosophy because his father was quite an influential figure over him wondering we didn't get around to when when handin he was giving us that background was the power of the professor and the professorship seen Germany at that time and they were an extremely powerful not only intellectual positions but social positions and sharp and I would aspire to that and there was Hegel both a professor and a great philosopher can you tell us why he attacked Hegel so violently and what he said against him right well I think the chief word that he tends to use when writing about Hegel is that of charlatans I mean anybody who's read Hegel or tried to read Hegel even would find that it's quite a difficult read there's quite a lot of heavy terminology and a sense of a certain amount of obscurity in his writing Schopenhauer thought that all of this was a bit of a bombastic kind of smokescreen for some rather empty thought on the one hand he also thought that Hegel's idea that by reason we could reach some knowledge of the absolute and that there was this perfection that everything was striving for he found these notions really rather ridiculous also his thought was very a historical shopping her a non historical that's to say he didn't think that the essence of human beings or of the world ever really changed so Hegel's idea that everything is progressing towards perfection through history was something completely an affirmative show up in our so what happened to really inflamed his hostility to Hegel was that Chopin era is a very young lecturer put on his lectures at the same time as Hegel's Hagel as Antonia said was the star of the academic establishment had this professorship at Berlin had 200 people in his lectures Shopper now had about five I think and it sort of petered out and he basically never returned after one semester of teaching never returned to his academic career of course he was unable to do that because he had this private income but throughout his life he was then very contemptuous towards what he called university professors people who made a career out of doing philosophy he thought you should be independent minded and not sort of kowtow to the establishment did his attack on Hegel have any effect on Hegel's reputation I don't think it really did not at that stage because shopping had himself wasn't really read much until until about the 1850s I mean there were a couple of reviews of his books earlier on but he didn't really have an audience until the last decade of his life he died in 1860 and only just then did he start to become recognised as a philosopher by which time I think it's true to say that Hegel's hegemony his influence was waning already and beatrice on par and so shop shop shop owner turned against Hegel and the one of the people who went back to his can't he was also influenced by Plato but that stick with canted about what did he find in Kent that was attractive well he particularly liked can't epistemology his fury of knowledge and the distinction that Kant introduced between on the one hand a phenomenal world and the nominal world on the other so the phenomenal world is a world as we perceive it through time space and as organized by the laws causality and phenomena are all the things that are in it so Melvin you're a phenomenon I'm a phenomenon as well so to take an example I'm sitting on a chair I perceive that in space as an extended object in time as something that is here now and as part of a network of causes and effects for example I'm sitting on it because I moved it so the phenomenal world is really the world as it is dependent on a set of perceptual conditions time and space and conceptual conditions the law of causality that's really Chopin house version of count because then count it's slightly different but the main distinction is the same so the question arises of what would happen if these conditions were bracketed and one way to think about this is to imagine a time-space and causality as a pair of glasses or to speak that would be hard wide on us so everything we see we have to see as mediated through time-space and causality and the question is what will happen if these glasses were somehow removed would it be the case that there would be nothing that everything would disappear now Schopenhauer follows count in saying that no this would not happen what we would have is the world as it is in itself independently from perceptual and conceptual conditions that's what he calls phenomenal world but just in the same way as without the glasses we wouldn't be able to see the phenomenal world in the same way we cannot know anything about the nominal world we can say that it exists but no knowledge of it is possible the new mental world is things like is there a god does God exist things that cannot be can it be proved yes well it's well there are it's these are questions that's one metaphysical questions that could be answered if we knew about the essence of things and in particular indeed whether there is a God whether we have a soul wherever world has an end that sort of thing but we the idea for count and that's why she open her actually differs from in but the idea for count is that these questions are unanswerable because there's no empirical basis on which we could form appropriate knowledge which would give us answers the children are challenged that that was his discriminative can indeed what grounds into challenges how could we know about the as far as he was concerned right okay and what round I think it's because he thinks that although can't secure the possibility of empirical knowledge in particular through the sciences that leaves out exactly the sort of questions that we were talking about and these to him are the most important ones you know what's the essence of a world wise where suffering what's the meaning of human life so he tried very hard to bypass what's often called the Kantian prohibition the impossibility of knowing vain itself and he found a rather intriguing way which starts with the observation but our bodies are very ambiguous objects on one hand they are phenomena empirical objects like everything else so if I look at my hand I see it as extended in space I could calculate its position compared to the table converter microphone and so forth there's nothing different with say the microphone itself and that's representational knowledge on the other hand I also have he says this inner access to my body so I know where my hand is in space without any calculation I know what it feels to have the hand as opposed to having a foot for example I know whether I'm in pain or not so Sherman who thinks that this inner access so to speak to the body is a form of non representational knowledge which therefore can bypass the Kantian prohibition and it works he says as an access to to visit to the Lavi in itself and if I focus on this intuitive access to my body then what I discover he thinks is when I'm nothing but a set of desires and drives and these desires and drives he calls the will and then in book 2 of his major opus the world as women representation he precedes to extend this insight to the home world so not just our body is not just us but everything in the phenomenal world is what he calls an objectification of the will and he has so for animals for example they like have desires they want to live fundamentally plants try to grow and even comes up with interesting examples like crystals which shall for him halfway between the mineral and via vegetal world and who also which also show an aspiration to grow so he comes with to his conclusion ant accountant conclusion that it is possible to no vein in seven luminal world although not through a presentational knowledge and its name its essence is will obscure if ik I want to go back a bit now sure just this and that and that wonderful covering the course but Anton Anthony growling so we still he's with the cantina idea his challenge got part of the content ideas bit roses outline so very lucidly but let's just go back to his first serious work was called a principle of sufficient reason is that an important work to start with it was his first really public what's important about it as far as shopping house concept if his doctoral dissertation and at his first publication impact self-published yes the the fourfold roof of the principle of sufficient reason it was called magnificent title and it was an examination really of their idea that causality the concept of causality and the idea that everything that is has to have been produced by some antecedent set of conditions have very important implications for his later thought the idea is that anything which is the case has been produced by a set of conditions which is sufficient for making it the case and that therefore the thing thus produced follows from its ground by necessity this turned out to be very important later on because in a very sophisticated analysis of the notion of free will which perhaps we will come on to later on it provided him with his reason for thinking that all individual actions are causally necessitated have to be even though that left room for an idea of overall responsibility premise on our character but the examination of the idea of grounds and of the relation of grounds to what follows from them the idea of the sufficient the necessary conditions which would have to be invoked in an explanation of anything that is produced that's the subject of that dissertation Christopher January let's let's now come to is this great work an early early great work is as often okay so well in doe much and which Beatrice is talking about the diary of the will can you take us on from my uterus took us to take that a bit further and emphasize what it is so our listeners know exactly what we can be talking about for the rest of the program okay well shoppin house suggests that or very strongly argues that the essence of everything is will and I think probably the the nearest we can get to this is the idea that everything is in some way striving or trying or tending in a direction the difficulty with this notion is that he thinks that for most for the most part this is a blind striving so nature is not conscious it doesn't have desires in the the literal sense that human beings do with their conscious minds however he thinks that everything in nature is of one kind and sense that everything is in some way striving to be something and indeed even in human beings a lot of the will is unconscious or it's the way that our body functions to fulfill needs and interests that we have we're not consciously making our heartbeat or digesting things or and so on but he sees all this as a way of striving a way of the will trying to keep itself alive he also thinks that reproduction is part of this and indeed the expression which is often translated as will to life is very crucial to Strasse feet it's not just the will to live as it could also be translated it's also the will to produce life so he actually sees that one of our the primary drive of human beings is not only to survive but to reproduce themselves and he gives a great importance to sexuality under the heading of reproduction and he thinks that the very important thing for human beings is that this is our essence our essence is really not rationality rationality distinguishes us from other animals but it just makes us cleverer at attaining the things we strive for but it's the striving this that the neediness that really is our essence is really what is empowering us along there's a big switch here from earlier philosophy particularly enlightenment philosophy that sees reason as somehow the essence of human beings he's very much against that idea I'm Burton Park can you can we take this even further and push into this this as I understand it he tells that this this will is both infinite and meaningless if that's right can you tell us why thinks that yes well there's really two things the first is that he doesn't believe in satisfaction of desire he thinks that at best these are may be satisfied for a short time but then what will happen is that immediately another desire will emerge so the thought is that this driving that Chris was talking about is infinite there's no end point which we could reach and that's probably an offer of his lines of a position with Hegel there's no progress there's no end point that we could reach where we could rest so to speak and desire this I would be satisfied in fact he does in he does mention cases which could look like that so when we are satisfied and we stay satisfied for a while but then what happens he thinks is boredom and the satisfaction of desire itself becomes painful so to speak and he has faced this great formula saying that life oscillates like a pendulum between desire and boredom which each in their way painful so it's this endless character of desire which also makes it meaningless because whatever we achieve there is the sense that this is just a drop of water in the sea of desires so to speak there's no end state no ultimate goal for for the will it is just endlessly blindly as Chris said striving and the best it can hope for so to speak is to become aware of itself in its higher phenomenon namely human beings but I guess well we'll get back to that well I think we're gonna try to get someone here that no identity growling and can you tell us how he was but I mentioned anyway went whizzed past it we didn't stop at that bus stop later but you talked a bit about conquered another big influence on him remarkably for the time and perhaps even uniquely for Western philosophy punish arts and import oriental thought might say as much philosophy how did the Buddhism and the Hindu pedantic philosophy play into what he was trying what he was saying about the world until it's necessary just to remark that understanding of Indian philosophy and the early 19th century was still in a nascent State it was still just emerging which is why when people talk about showing her and he's interested in that I mean they tend to run together two separable things although they do have connections that is between Vedanta which is associated with Upanishads and the tradition of what you might walk to later came to be called Hindu thought on the one hand and Buddhism on the other which is a separate thing although it does have great commonalities with the early and middle Upanishads that the key similarity between Sharon house thought and Indian thought is with Buddhism with the idea that striving yearning restlessness is cause of suffering and that therefore the character of the world the character of experience in the world is suffering and that the only way that one can escape suffering according to the Buddhist tradition is to cease to will to cease to strive and to yearn and to desire and this denial of the this refusal to be driven on into suffering by the whale is the source the route of escape and shipment how very much agrees with that now he arrived at this view independently I think I think when he was doing his early work of beginning work in his twenties on the world is building representation he wasn't that aware but when he did become aware of those Upanishads which of the texts of the Vedanta tradition he immediately recognized the similarity of thought and sort of embraced it claimed that he read one or two of the verses of the Upanishads every night for the rest of his life yes he did indeed it actually was quite early he was given a copy of the of a rather strange Latin translation of the Upanishads when he was quite young and it did almost become like a Bible for him so he had early knowledge for Europe and shads while he was writing the world as well I only found out about Buddhism later and then was very pleased to find that there was a convergence just can we develop this on what can you give list of some idea of what more specifically he's taking from the Punishers and how it's matching in with his his views that he's taken from Canton Sona are these spliced together all or just one grow out of the other I don't know what I don't think they are there no they all splice together yes the I guess the main idea is really the one that Anthony was explaining namely the thought that there is no sense satisfaction is not durable satisfaction and cessation of pain is not really possible the only way out for us to speak is and forward will itself is self-denial renunciation that certainly one aspect there's another important aspect I think in his ethical theory because one of the fundamental Buddhist ideas is that harming others is fundamentally harming oneself and we should be aware of that now in the fourth book of a will as well done representation Schopenhauer develops an idea which is very similar he says that when one thinks about the contrast between the essence of the world and the phenomenal world what one finds is that although the world at its heart is just one it's the will at the phenomenal default level in which we live everyday level what we see is endless strife and war and just in a just by in order to stay alive we have to destroy things we eat animals we eat plants and so forth and we all end out he thinks we've a sort of fundamental egotism which places us at the center of our universe so and that is of course a severe cause of unhappiness and conflict and the thought he takes from Buddhism is that through compassion it is possible to realize that our essence is the same as that of all other phenomena and that therefore these phenomenal strife stripes which agitate the empirical world could be overcome if we identified with other beings and realized that in harming them we harm each other know we harm ourselves as well does he think that recognizing the will can teach us how to live sure banana is easy déjame to teach us how to live or his name just to examine the world as it isn't that's what his aim is and we take from it what we want to well I think his aim is indeed to give us a reorient description of the world and our sense of what we are the very fundamental thing that Beatrice has touched on is the idea that somehow being an individual isn't ultimate I mean being an individual is in some way you're under a bit of an illusion that you the individual matter any more than anything else and indeed in some sense the individual is illusory if you go down to the level of what things are in themselves beyond the phenomenal level there are no individuals I mean his metaphysics suggests that the thing in itself can't be divide the world the world as it is in itself at what its real essence is can't be divided up into separate things at all there's a sense in which art myself the individual that I find myself as isn't fundamental at all I think that's an important thing that he wants us to think it's a very tough message in a way he thinks of what isn't you can yell about that a bit I mean he is he's saying something like Oh what he is also I'm very early on saying animals are just as important plants are just as important he's saying that compared with as it were what other people are saying at the time there is the ease abolished all hierarchies completely yes in terms of value yes as I said I think before that it's a big difference between ourselves and other animals in that we have reason reason enables us to make judgements have logical arguments be motivated by thoughts about the future thoughts about the past animals live in a continual present and are quite different from us in that way but it doesn't make them well a it doesn't make human beings any happier because as well as suffering from the present we suffer from our anxieties about the future and our guilt and remorse about the past which animals are free from also it doesn't make us any ethical e any more valuable it makes us more liable to do harm because we're cleverer you know we can we can take great steps to to elaborately harm other beings which animals can't and also we don't have any greater moral worth by virtue of being rational because the whole point about morality is it's about suffering as Beatrice has said animals suffer because they will they have desires they have needs those desires can be thwarted and hence they suffer just as much as we do so ethically we're on a par with other animals and in fact Schopenhauer certainly later in his later works he discovers quite a lot about societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals particularly in Britain he is one thing about Britain that he's very praised it's very much is that it has this concern for animals and there's in the early 19th century they're beginning to be these societies to protect them and he thinks it's scandalous how animals of jtd mentions vivisection and the use of animals to burden and so on and in this way he seems to be actually very contemporary with us his concern for animal welfare I'm Joey can we get back to this idea of what is unknowable the numeral and how why Schopenhauer thought that there are ways to know the unknowable can we talk about it in terms of sexual desire for instance which he as have said early on in the program was a big part of what he wrote and how the appetites might take us can you just I don't think we've talked about it if I don't need a people listening let's talk about me I've got a clear in a find what the new mill numeral is and how it is he pulled it into a possible area of knowledge Chris reminded me just before the program as it happens that cat that Schopenhauer himself didn't like the word Newman or itself he always used the expression thing in itself so well will the stick stick to that one's opinion itself the thing in itself yeah the idea here is that everything that appears to us in the phenomenal world is bitterest is described is both something for us because of the nature of our cognitive capacities of how we perceive and conceive it but it is also something that has a nature in itself and in the Kantian philosophy this is sealed off from us all we can know about you to some negative things namely that they don't obey the categories of thought that constitute the phenomenal world for us but they keep the key thing again as Beatrice noticed earlier is that we have access to this to the thing in itself through our own experience of of willing that there is some scholarly dispute here and Chris will be the recipients will be the experts on this about whether what we actually get in touch with is the thing in itself will through our experience of willing or whether our own experience of willing brings us as close as it's possible for us to get to the ultimate metaphysical reality but let's just just take it that we get into direct contact with this underlying metaphysical reality of all things through our own experience of desiring of yearning of having these urgencies one of which of course is indeed a sexual desire because the a tremendous feature of the universe is this this will to life to you Asian not just as Chris pointed out to being alive or stayin alive but also to producing more life then one of the big influences as it may be even if it's in director on Freud is the idea that this unconscious sexual drive is a powerful determinant of what we are and our experience but it is that it's the fact that we feel our appetites that we are driven by them that it's very hard it's hard work as Chris pointed out earlier on to do the work of self-denial that is most direct palpable recognition of the underlying reality of things the will but is he actually saying that sexual desire and sexual consummation in themselves are a new or a thing or a Newman elects perience which then brings us back into an area where we can describe what is supposed to be unknowable well the the presence of any kind of desire and yearning and sexual desire would be a particularly notable feature of it is our experience of the things in the thing in itself which is this underlying metaphysical reality sexual confirmation is a quite different thing and it would only ever be at best a temporary cessation of that appetite because it would soon recur depending upon our energetic one is so it would be part a feature of this of the the sort of infinitude of the limitlessness of the earning the striving the willing that causes our experience of suffering it has some there's a very important essay that he wrote in the second volume of the world as will and representation in 1844 on the metaphysics of sexual love and it's it's a very quite a well read text he suggests that we experience desire as an individual for another individual so it's on the phenomenal level that this all occurs but we're under it again and we're under kind of illusion that really it's me this individual desiring this on their individual what's really happening underneath is that our essence our nature which is common to the rest of the world is kind of driving us on we're kind of pushed along by this this driving this will which we're kind of at the mercy of where we're imprisoned by we're yes we're in prison by it it even if we try to shut out shut it out and get on with our intellectual life it always keeps intruding into our thoughts I think there's a bit of a personal confession here that his sexual desires were very strong and we found it very hard to accommodate them to his is intellectual persona I think but that's perhaps another another story but romantic love is a kind of illusion that disappears he says as soon as we possess the individual we desire we realized that it is just any old sexual desire yeah he actually says that love is a trick of nature to ensure the reproduction of a species so any you know higher what we might thought of as a higher feelings are just illusory what the bottom line is for species has to go on beyond the individuals and nature will do anything that ensures ways including generating feelings of love increasing dividuals we've got fleetingly about self-denial or getting outside oneself in using oriental as a guide towards that but he also thought that one relief one escape was art particularly music can you tell us why he thought that music was a way to escape the swing between pain and boredom well music is an interesting case for Schopenhauer it's at the top of his hierarchy of the arts and what makes it special is that it's Vionnet art in which we have a direct attunement if you like to the essence of the world and we can feel that in the way music moves us directly without the need for visual representations without the need for words the thought is that when we hear music we this sort of materializes v4 dries that are not working in the world and he actually then correlates a very you know the bass for trouble and so forth two great forces in the universe so music is really the most immediate of ovl so of all the arts were one in which we can feel so to speak our new mental essence in in in the highest and most powerful way and most outstanding leave agna read sharpen our massively were told in the middle of the 19th century when he wasn't composing or composing very little indeed and partly because of the privileges people said is there's all of music and took it into his music and try to use the philosophy to help him write the music yes after the Asian forty eight revolution which felt my taking part in his on the barricades he ran away to Switzerland all his colleagues all about heads been put in prison and he spent a number of years thinking rethinking really his approach to music and to opera and it was what they began work on the ring and he had written the libretto for the entire ring had begun work on the music for the first two parts of the ring when he encountered Schopenhauer now he for the rest of his life okay he read Schopenhauer talked about Schopenhauer disgusted with Cosimo you look at costumers Diaries is an enormous number of references to Schopenhauer in five myths of speech but but they an underlying ground note of all that is that what Wagner felt when he read Schopenhauer was that here was somebody who articulated what he himself had already felt that is that music is this the ultimate expression when it expresses sorrow and joy and love and ecstasy it's not the sorrow joy love ecstasy of a particular individual or a moment but sorrow joy ecstasy itself it's it's absolutely an expression of of the metaphysical realities and see he was there he was right in the middle of writing the ring hadn't really begun to write the music for the at least the last two parts of the ring but he had to stop and write a different opera Tristan and Isolda which is the perhaps the the best purest expression of of the application of ideas that Varner recognized and found a resonance in China two partners own work it is that is par excellence if you like the ship and our opera that bark narrator can I just director Craig can I just say can you give us just a few more names who me influenced deeply because it seems to me from the reading for this program but ease his ideas did gather force and sweep through the late 19th and way into the 20th century with some strong figures taking that's right or taking him on yeah that's right I mean the most obvious is Nietzsche who read Schopenhauer avidly in the way that fragmented and in fact shared this passion with Varga who he knew but then Nietzsche came to see the the resignation ISM and the self-denial and the loser anus of the individual as really a kind of intellectual illness that Europe was suffering from and I think in my view much of Nietzsche's philosophy is built around an opposition to these ideas the idea of affirmation of life of becoming properly at the individual that you are rather than self-denial so I think that's the most important influence we've mentioned Freud briefly Freud himself said it was remarkable how his ideas have been prefigured by Schopenhauer we've mentioned the the prominence of sexual desire in shop and house accounts somehow the essence of the human being is a drive towards sexual intercourse that was very echoed by Freud but also shopper now has an interesting prefiguring of Freud's notion of repression and he thinks that there's a kind of a kind of madness in which painful memories get eradicated by the mind and some illusory content is replaced with it Freud recognized that as a prefiguring his own idea of repression features the other influence quite a number of writers think of Hardy and Lawrence and cameo and they seemed of taking him on board quite strongly so they did he in that sense you think if somebody who really did prefigure what was going to happen in the falling nose or did they take him up and be which way did it work well let's take the example of off-camera and in particular what cami said about me absurd he said he read ASSA fee and he took two ideas from children ha one is but ultimately life is meaningless and the other is that we do him to suffer and he put that in what he he called via the paradox for the absurd namely on the one hand we're bound to look for meaning in our lives that's just what we do and on the other hand if we take a cold hard look at the universe when we see it's there's no ultimate meaning fair I'm sorry after I wish my fault I'm completely messed up at the timing Thank You violent integrating Christopher John away next week what is it CG you monster thanks for listening if you've enjoyed this BBC podcast why not try others such as start the week the radio for discussion program where Andrew Marr sets the cultural agenda for the next seven days to find out more visit bbc.co.uk/topgear

Channel: BBC Podcasts

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Keywords: schopenhauer, philosophy, pessimism, arthur schopenhauer (author), kant, will, philosophy (field of study), arthur schopenhauer, school, idealism, arthur, metaphysics, arthur schopenhauer (philosopher), ethics, transcendental idealism, representation, buddhism, nietzsche, history of philosophy, determinism, transcendental, the will, immanuel kant, theory of knowledge, world as will and representation, monism, natalism, existentialism, nihilism

Id: MDtIcYM-tAo

Length: 42min 18sec (2538 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 11 2018