The Darkest Philosopher in History - Arthur Schopenhauer

this video is sponsored by the book summary service blinkist being one of the first philosophers to ever really question the value of existence to systematically combine eastern and western modes of thinking and to introduce the arts as a serious philosophical focus arthur schopenhauer is perhaps one of the darkest and most comprehensive philosophers in western history schopenhauer was born in 1788 in what is now gdank's poland but spent the majority of his childhood in hamburg germany after his family moved there when he was five he was born to a wealthy family his father being a highly successful international merchant as a result of this young schopenhauer would be expected to follow in his father's footsteps however from an early age he had no interest in business and instead found himself compelled towards academics and after going on a trip around europe with his parents to prepare him for his merchant career the greater exposure he would receive to the pervasive suffering and poverty of the world would cause him to become all the more interested in pursuing the path of scholarship and intellectually examining down to its very core how the world worked and why or perhaps more accurately how and why it appeared to work so negatively after eventually going against his family's ready-made path of international business schopenhauer would attend the university of gottingen in 1809 where in his third semester he would become more introduced and focused on philosophy the following year he would transfer to the university of berlin to study under a better philosophy program led by distinguished philosophy lecturers of the time however schopenhauer would soon find academic philosophy to be unnecessarily obscure detached from real concerns of life and often tethered to theological agendas all of which he despised eventually he left the academic intellectual circuit and spent the following decade philosophizing and writing on his own [Music] by age 30 schopenhauer had published the two works that would go on to define his entire career contain his complete unified philosophical system from which he would never deviate and eventually influence the entire course of western thinking with the first groundwork of his philosophy was established in his dissertation on the four-fold root of the principle of sufficient reason published in 1813 and his entire unified philosophical system including his metaphysics epistemology ethics aesthetics value judgments and so forth was laid out in his subsequent masterwork the world as will and representation published in 1819 despite these impressive works going on to hold major stake in western philosophy influencing some of the greatest thinkers and schools of thought thereafter during this time they would go mostly unnoticed over the decades following his early work throughout his 30s and 40s schopenhauer would spend his time working to be a lecturer at university as well as a translator of french to english prose while continuing to write on and off along the side he found very little success in all of it his lectures were unpopular his translations received very little interest and his philosophical work remained mostly overlooked only by around his 50s did schopenhauer finally start to receive any notable recognition at all and only after publishing a book of essays in aphorisms in 1851 would he achieve the status of fame which he would remain in for the rest of his life until he died in 1860 at the age of 72. in terms of schopenhauer's philosophical system established within his work it is relevant to note that it leaned heavily on the work of his predecessor emmanuel kant in schopenhauer's mind he was completing kant's system of transcendental idealism building off his interpretation of kant schopenhauer essentially suggested that the world as we know and experience it is exclusively a representation created by our mind through our senses and forms of cognition consequently we cannot access the true nature of external objects outside our mental phenomenological experience of them deviating from kant however schopenhauer would go on to argue that not only can we not know nor access the varying objects of the world as they really are outside of our conscious experience but there is in fact no plurality of objects beyond our experience at all rather beyond our experience is according to schopenhauer a singular unified oneness of reality a sort of essence or force that drives existence that is beyond time beyond space and beyond all objectification schopenhauer would go on to explore and define this force by referencing and probing into the experience of living within the body suggesting that this is the only thing in the world that we have access to that is not solely a mental representation of an object but is also a first-hand subjective experience from within it from here schopenhauer would suggest that what is found from within at the core of our being is an unconscious restless striving force towards survival nourishment and reproduction he would term this force the will to live essentially this would lead him to the conclusion that reality is made up of two sides one side being the plurality of things as they are represented to a conscious apparatus and the other side being the singular unified force of the will hence the name of his masterwork the world as will and representation it is worth noting that the term will can perhaps be misleading and that it might seem to imply an intention or human-like conscious motivation but the will for schopenhauer is a blind unconscious striving with no goal or purpose other than to keep itself going for the sake of keeping itself going all of the material world operates by and through this will moving striving consuming and violently expressing itself in order to sustain itself schopenhauer's work was largely a response to kant and the western philosophical tradition but his work also contains distinct notes of hinduism and buddhism his conclusion of the nature of reality is strikingly similar to that of both and his qualitative assessment of reality's negative relationship with the conscious self mirrors ideas central to buddhism this made schopenhauer one of the first philosophers to ever really combine eastern and western thinking in such a systematically comprehensive way especially similar to buddhism schopenhauer would top off his philosophical medley with a layer of dark unwavering pessimism unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life our existence must entirely fail of its aim it is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance each separate misfortune as it comes seems no doubt to be something exceptional but misfortune in general is the rule schopenhauer wrote as a qualitative assessment of the nature of reality he would describe the will to live as a sort of malevolent force that we as individual selves become victims of in its process of continuation deceived by our own mind and body to go against our fundamental interests and yearnings in order to carry it out since the will has no aim or purpose other than its perpetual continuation then the will can never be satisfied and since we are expressions of it neither can we thus we are driven to consume beings things ideas goals circumstances and all the rest constantly hoping we will feel a satisfaction or happiness as a result while constantly being left in the wake of each achievement unsatisfied human life must be some kind of mistake the truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy and that even when they are satisfied all he obtains is a state of painlessness where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom schopenhauer wrote as the best possible ways of sort of escaping and dealing with this schopenhauer would put forth two primary methods one engaging in arts and philosophy and two the practicing of asceticism traditionally being the deprivation of nearly all desire self-indulgence and everything past the bare minimum in this latter method schopenhauer felt that by denying the will from being fed so to speak one would turn the will against itself and overcome it however he also recognized the sheer difficulty of this for the majority of people and suggested the average person should simply make their best efforts towards letting go of ideals of happiness and pleasure and rather focus on the minimization of pain happiness in life for schopenhauer is not a matter of joys and pleasures but rather the reduction and freedom from pain as much as possible the safest way of not being very miserable is to not expect to be very happy he wrote alternatively engaging in arts and philosophy in schopenhauer's mind served as another more accessible method he felt that good art could provide a source of clarity into the nature and problems of being without any of the illusion or drapery and while engaging in this sort of art one would have a transcendent-like experience that provides a relief and comfort from existence as a result of this concept schopenhauer would end up being one of the first thinkers to ever really introduce philosophical significance to the arts and would eventually become known by many as the artist's philosopher [Music] of course throughout his work in general schopenhauer makes large often unprovable and unknowable claims about the nature of reality and the value of existing within it some of which is validly constructed and worth considering but some of which is likely not ultimately any attempt to define and assess the side of reality beyond logic and reason through systematic logic and reason is perhaps paradoxical in a way that is beyond repair what precisely is the will where does it come from where does it end and how can we know or prove it and in terms of schopenhauer's suggestion that one should turn against the will through an ascetic process of self-denial if all of life operates through the will to turn against it would seem to merely be the will turning against the will for reasons that favor it and there can be no turning against the will if the will is doing the turning alternatively considering the view of friedrich nietzsche a philosopher who notably followed in schopenhauer's footsteps the endless cycle of desire and dissatisfaction caused by the will is actually a good thing that we can use as fuel towards the process of self-overcoming and growth which we can then obtain life's meaning from of course this is the more pleasant of the two interpretations but it isn't clear which is more apt and or accurate if either ultimately schopenhauer is another surprising yet seemingly common story where a highly important thinker artist or writer barely caught any recognition in their life if at all only to die and end up with their name in nearly every history book on the subject one trait these stories do all seem to have in common though is a refusal to stop a refusal to budge from pursuing and defending the world as one sees it schopenhauer never deviated from the philosophical system he created in his twenties and never stops confidently working to build upon it and reinforce it throughout his life despite the world seeming to suggest to him he should do otherwise and yet now it is hugely significant to the world that he did exactly what he did for some his work might be bleak and disconcerting but for others his work like all great works of dark melancholic honesty is comforting relieving and legitimizing it reminds us that we are not crazy and our sadness and suffering are not unfounded even when they may feel like it we are merely put in a crazy sad violent reality with the mind and body that are often all in conspiracy against us because of this and many other reasons unmentioned his work would go on to influence artists like richard wagner and gustav mahler writers like marcel proust leo tolstoy and samuel beckett and thinkers like friedrich nietzsche sigmund freud and ludwig wickenstein as well as many others ultimately influencing the course of modern thinking forever having been one of the first to properly and philosophically bring the value of life and the possibility of meaning into question schopenhauer helped locate the early budding problem of the growing agnostic world that philosophy would need to address with humanity seemingly suspending further out into a void of meaning his unyielding and fearless confrontation with the nature of existence including all its horrors and miseries revealed an opening of new possibilities towards finding answers from within [Music] this video was sponsored by blinkist andy age 22 sits on the subway reading he is currently about a third of the way through the book until the end of time by brian greene so far it's a very good book but it's starting to veer off somewhat unexpectedly from theoretical physics into more soft sciences more interested in the hard sciences and he loses some degree of interest having already read 4 out of 11 chapters though he is compelled to keep reading a couple weeks later after finishing the book it never really comes back around to what he was hoping for months go by and andy finds that he's forgotten most of what was contained in the book he often has this problem even with many of his favorites he sometimes has to reread books spending a lot of additional time trying to extract the key points again and refresh himself the whole process of trying to find good books he's interested in reading them hoping he's right returning to them later to refresh slowly draws down on andy's reading habits only in his later adult years does he really start reading consistently again now in his mid-60s he is reading a book about a theory in quantum mechanics known as the many worlds interpretation which essentially suggests that there are near infinite other worlds that exist in parallel to each other where outcomes of quantum measurements disperse explaining the randomness in physics impossible for andy to ever know this theory is in fact true and at this exact moment in perfect irony in another world another andy is listening to an audiobook called fooled by randomness which is about the influence of luck on the economy and life in this particular world consumer technology has advanced differently and when andy was around 22 he was introduced to a website and smartphone app that condenses thousands of non-fiction books into around 15-minute summaries providing their main ideas and key takeaways it also provides complete audio books and summaries of podcasts and he is currently using the audiobook feature to listen to the complete version of fooled by randomness after having listened to the book summary breakdown in the same amount of time of his life using this app andy has explored thousands of books authors and a huge range of new topics outside his immediate interests he has maintained a consistent and broad lifelong reading habit and because of this he has also discovered a passion for media which changed the entire course of his career the app is of course blinkist and in this world it also exists and in this world the first 100 people to use the link in the description will receive one free week of unlimited access as well as five percent off of full membership the free seven day trial can be canceled at any time within the trial period and of course thank you so much for watching in general and see you next video [Music] you

Channel: Pursuit of Wonder

Views: 672,782

Rating: 4.965538 out of 5

Keywords: Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosophy of, philosophy, western, eastern, buddha, Buddhism, imanuel kant, pursuit of wonder, school of life, academy of ideas, ted, ted ed, after skool, consciousness, pessimism, thinking, inspiration, friedrich nietzsche, happy, happiness

Id: MpMkXyBWpl8

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021