The Germans: Schopenhauer

alright ladies and gentlemen thanks for coming out Schopenhauer number three in the series on the Germans the German philosophers and this is a three classic German idealist and I'll talk about what that means but I want to start off by sort of a general overview of the approach to philosophy and something I think is often done wrong when I was an undergraduate I was given my introduction to Schopenhauer was his masterwork is the world is will in representation and that's about 600 pages depending on the edition and we had like you know two weeks to read it now this is this is criminal this is criminal is you cannot read usefully a work of this nature in six weeks it's sort of something that has to be read slowly over a long period of time and so I basically thought nothing of Schopenhauer because up that well that book was incomprehensible and I couldn't make heads or tails of it and two week nobody can in a couple of weeks my god enough to pass the test but that was just you know ephemeral in and out and then much later I discovered Schopenhauer's essays now throughout his life he wrote a series of short essays on a wide range of subjects and they're wonderful I mean not sometimes were just horrifying but they're great because they're short they're concise they're focused many of the central ideas from the world is will in representation are presented in a much more comprehensible fashion because he takes a very small subset of them he has articles on how to live a quality life how to make a budget stretch on history on art on me I mean he just has this huge range and like I said he and he was sort of a great misanthrope he was a hater of people and so the joke I say is is Schopenhauer hates you but don't feel bad because hope reach open our hates everybody you know and so but in these essays you get this incredible mind lucid clear and thinking and an independent mind whatever else you think of his thoughts pretty clear Schopenhauer wasn't trying to impress you at any moment he was just this is what Schopenhauer thinks and I thought when I read him I was why why would you give an undergraduate an incomprehensible 600 page tome to read in two weeks when they could have given us a lovely selection of two or three of these essays which give you a lot to argue about by the way because there's much disagreeable content he has all kinds of illuminating things to say about women for instance and uh and and and instead give you these you know this brick and say go and I think this is a mistake people often make so if you're interested in philosophy you'd want to read some philosophy which I always recommend read the original people and their original sources you know look for the short works don't start with Kant's critique of Pure Reason oh good lord don't even end with Kant's critique okay but but you know his preface to any future metaphysics is really short and concise and pretty moderately relative to Kant incredibly understandable and lots of other philosophers have the same thing they have some long works which doesn't mean they're not important the world is representation and or will and representation is a great work but you know you have to read it over about two years slowly and with lots of background to help you out so you know be leery don't don't don't think you have to start with sort of Everest feel free to start you know with a nice hike through a low rolling Hill and I think it'll be much more pleasant I say sort of in retrospect I got quite upset with that I'm like what oh what a waste what what's the point of that it's just a baffle s and you know sort of sort of I think it says intellectual hazing so don't so don't fall for that the short works are important interesting engaging and easy much easier to digest and argue with and then these incomprehensible long terms having said that of course we're gonna spend the rest of the night talking about the world as will and representation so idealism this is important to figure out what's going on here and the I think the first philosopher probably the first philosopher call himself an idealist was caught and he called himself a transcendental idealist and what that means is nobody knows it's like the biggest open debate in conte and scholarship is what the hell did can't mean by transcendental idealism and because it's caught you can't figure it I wrote about it for hundreds of pages but Wow but generally if people I want to weigh to get into this I guess is to think about des cartes famous I think therefore I am so hopefully you know this because one of this brilliant little thought experiments and he said imagine that the world the universe is run by an evil demon who want to baffle us and so all of our sense input is not just unreliable but actively wrong actively designed to trick us so this is that problem of how much of the world that we sins can we trust and he said the one thing that you have to be left with was the notion that you do think otherwise there would be nothing to trick right and so he said that is where you can start cogito ergo sum I think therefore I am this was an incredible sort of insight that Descartes came up with and really feeds into first the idealist idea from cought which is yes you think therefore you are but like the evil demon the only thing you ever think about is what's in your mind the sense perception you have of the world is not the world you have no access to the world and so you just have to let go of that and what we're thinking and what we're reasoning about the thinking here is reasoning is how things enter our mind and you can't ever get beyond that so he just sort of abandons the entire notion of coming into contact with an external real world and so this Wisconsin idea of idealism as he called it because the truth that you have is the truth generated from your own reasoning which is good but that truth is not based on anything associated in the world which people found unsatisfactory so he sort of gives with what I can't always does he gives with one hand and he takes away with the other and so then you get someone like will you get sick too and show you a whole bunch of guys who were arguing against this but for our purposes you can go to Hague and Hegel says well on one hand it's true that you only perceive what's inside of you but what's inside of you is part of a world spirit the world is not a bunch of separate things it's sort of a unified thing with a lot of manifestations and therefore when you look inside yourself you can discover something about the universe or at least the universal spirit that manifests yourself and the rest of the world and so while it's really hard to get knowledge about what they call it the stigma the thing itself right a chair how is that what's the real nature of the chair you are in this active process I should mention this by the way so for Kant the world is very frozen and static and you're in your mind and you might grow and change but as far as you know the universe is just organized totality that has nothing to do with you Hegel says no it's active and developing and you have these problems and limitations and challenges but they're always being overcome and new challenges come along and that we're headed someplace the world spirit and therefore us it's going to an end which will be sort of the perfection of man and the Society of man so by looking in you can discover something about the universe and you discover by the universe is that there's a plan and it's orderly and we're on our way someplace and that's great so people like this this helps make Hegel the most popular most powerful most recognized philosopher in Germany during his life at the University of Berlin and then into this comes Schopenhauer and he comes from a totally different place so his background is very different from most of the educated people at his time he was his father was and mother were wealthy merchant families father very much older than his mother but both sides the family were merchants and Danzig good nights today I think it's good dance good day yeah good answer today and so he was being raised to be a merchant which mean he didn't receive the classical education that would have led you into the University position that would have led you on to be a doctor philosophy that would have done this and so and he doesn't seem to have been like rebelling against this it's not like he's like oh I'm being forced to be a merchant he seemed to respect his father he liked the idea there very well off very comfortable and so he's like great this seems like a good gig gig and we're gonna make this work and then his father died probably by suicide but it's not clear but they thought certainly a Schopenhauer and his mother both stopped that that he his father at community suicide and so Wow what do you do now well his mom decided to move to vai Marv because that was a cultural capital of Germany of course Gerta is there lots of other leading lights of art and poetry and she actually established herself as a noted writer and salon of the runner of a salon in in vine mark famously visited by Goethe constantly so she established herself as sort of an intellectual light in her own right and was published made you know a fair amount of money and was very well known for her novels and biographies and travel writings in her lifetime like 24 volumes or some he was actually a significant contribution to letters and so Chopin our here he heads to college and originally he thinks I'll do medicine or law and then he gets there he starts thinking you know I think I want to do philosophy and he had a substantial inheritance from his father and it which his mother controlled but then when he became an adult release and she said look it's your money do whatever you want you want to study philosophy study philosophy so at the fairly advanced age like 20 or 21 he shifts from a sort of professional merchant maybe lawyer track to philosophy but this is a big jump because he did not go to the gymnasium system that gives him the the grounding and all the Greek and Roman classics and gives him the languages he had not done that systematic education that pretty much everybody else in the university would have she arrives at the University and decides it doesn't like anybody like some of this for so he did have friends there's not that he was a complete misanthrope but he didn't like any of the professors particularly he didn't like Hegel didn't like Fichte he didn't like these people he thought they were they're talking a bunch of nonsense and so he went to a bunch of math lectures and he went to a bunch of medicine and biology lectures didn't seem to go too very mannish philosophy lectures cuz it just made him angry when he went and so he sort of taught himself he's kind of an autodidact so when you look at his record of being in the university he was there for off and on for a couple of years but most of the time he was really just studying himself it was pretty much he knew who he didn't like and he trained himself to fight with him that was sort of you know one way to think of Schopenhauer and so he goes through the remember he's a man of independent means so he doesn't have to get along with anybody and he makes no effort to at any point in his life and so he moves around quite a bit and finally he decides okay I'm gonna write my dissertation and he writes his dissertation as I had to write it down so I could never remember it for full roots of sufficient reason and he submitted this for his ph.d in absentia which means he wasn't at the University when he submitted it that the professor's read it and said yeah good for you you get a PhD fine and so he's like right so now I'm gonna go back to Berlin where he was briefly in school and I'm gonna show those professors what's going on I'm gonna go preach the truth and so what you could do at that point is you would apply to the university to be allowed to lecture and if they said UK your qualifications are met we'll let you lecture that's all you don't they don't give you money or anything but the people coming to your lectures you would charge them and so sort of privado some is the sort of vague notion of this is your sort of a private lecturer so you're affiliated the university but not paid by the university and so your marginal position so because he disliked Hegel immensely and Hegel is the shining star Hegel is at the absolute apex of his fame and power and glory hundreds of people come to each of his lectures he's known throughout Germany throughout the European world he's a leading light of intellectual firmament and so Schopenhauer shows up and says right I'm gonna give my lectures at the same time as Hegel I am going to show them where the truth lies so at precisely the same time so like it's like across the street from him across the hall from Hegel who's backing the men and his world-famous he decides to give his lecture because he's got the truth and there's no evidence that he was a very good lecturer by the way and you know a couple of people three or four or five apparently showed up once and that was it and so this embittered him because he thought he was gonna show Hegel how it's done he hated Hegel for many reasons not the least of which he got nobody his lectures because he's skellige of them have to say is just crazy right yellow Schopenhauer irascible all the way so he kind of moves on from there and he writes his big work right after that he's upset with academia and basically never has much to do with it again as long as he lives I mean a little bit here and there but basically he didn't he just said fine ought to do that I'm independently wealthy wealthy is probably he has an independent means but he wasn't like super rich but he travel around a lot he could meet his expenses he made his money last he was smart he's made membranes merchants son so he knew how business was done took care of his money very well made it last through his whole life so he never worked and he focused on just training his own mind and thinking for himself but the major two works one the fourfold fourfold roots of sufficient reason and the world is will in representation he wrote by the time he was 30 and those were really the ground of his thinking they were not recognized and his thinking was not recognized as important for about another 20 years 25 years it took another couple of decades for people to start to recognize like hey there's something here hey we kind of like this Schopenhauer hey Hegel's star is waning people are looking around for new ideas and then by the time he dies last day out of his life he really achieved something the equivalent of Fame which at that point he just thought was useless and hilarious because he's like well this is great on famous at seventy no use for it make me money and I'm totally fine anyway but people would follow him around and get his autograph and you know stalk him at his house and so it was sort of bothered him but what made his ideas famous is now we go back to the idealism idea and this is from the world as will an idea to key item in lots of key ideas but the two that I put here I won't read the entire clothes but you'll just part of them it says the world is my idea the truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness if he really does this he has attained a philosophical wisdom it becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a son and on earth but only an eye that sees this on a hand that feels an earth that the world that surrounds him is there only as idea only in relation to something else the consciousness which is himself if any truth can be asserted a priori it is this for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and think Alex thinkable experience a form which is more general than time space or causality for they all presuppose a this is almost pure Conte though you don't see the Sun you only see what your eye perceives of the Sun you don't feel the world you only perceive what your hand feels of the world so far so good pure content idealism all that you know comes from an inside of you how it correlates to the external world who knows very low to know to maybe some but basically we're in our own heads I think therefore I am I reason things out that's what I have access to ah Schopenhauer adds a second part he says in fact this is by the way this is introductory sections from book 1 and book 2 of the world as will and representation in fact the meaning for which we seek of that world which is present to us only as our ideas or this transition from the world as mere idea of the knowing subject to whatever it may be besides this would never be found if the investigator himself were nothing more than pure knowledge subject a wink to cherub without a body so brain and jar right if we were just a brain in a jar then we would have no way of perceiving all this stuff so it's got to be more than just thinking but he is himself rooted in the world he finds himself in it as an individual this is to say his knowledge which is the necessary supporter of the whole world as idea is yet always given through the medium of the body ah we're incarnated as a body and he says everything in the universe we perceive as an external object the I object split and comes to us in the content sense roughly speaking as a perception in the mind so that's all we know right this is the idea so far he says except for one object and that object is our bodies we're a material object and because we're material objects there's one object in the universe that we actually know from the inside out that's not an object coming to us from the outside but that we're on the inside of everything else is external to us but because we have a body one object we've got so it's not pure knowledge that has no connection to real physical or metaphysical objects because there is one metaphysical or the one physical object that's ours and that's us our physical material bodies and this is his crack and once you get that he says you get a lot so what you're doing when you look inside of yourself is you're exploring a version of all of the other objects in the world in the universe because you're an object that you have internal sort of ontological access to you're not knowing it from the outside you're not knowing it through outside perception your knowing it from the inside and he says when you look into you so this is breakthrough number one it's important to note this says when when the card says I think therefore I am Conte says yeah right thinking that's where it's at and Schopenhauer basically says wait where does that thinking take place doesn't take place in a wing two cherubim doesn't take place in a brain in a jar it takes place in a body no body no thinking so you do know something about one object in the world absolutely real true grounded ontological knowledge yourself your body physically as a physical body and so he goes right here we go so you look inside yourself and what do you find he says what you find are a whole bunch of drives which he calls will and in German by the way this word is will so it's very easy to translate except for the way Schopenhauer uses this is not how it was used in German and not how we think of it in English there's no good translation for it more like ego or drives in the Freudian sense when he says will he but but he predates Freud and Freud actually said when he got around to reading Schopenhauer he said Oh Schopenhauer predicted just about everything I wrote because of this idea that if you look inside people they're these drives and those drives make us do things they're the drive he basically calls it the drive towards life and the drive towards life continuance reproduction so he writes a lot about sexuality was sort of blew Freud's mind when he discovered this he writes a lot about all of the other drives that we have and so he goes first we have bodies that are filled with these drives and then he makes another crucial claim or argument that is probably proven out to be relatively accurate which is in those drives are not rational they're either irrational or irrational they just don't care about rationality this is the huge break with Hegel and Kant basically in almost the entire Enlightenment tradition you can see why Schopenhauer stock rises fast with Romantic movement because he says at our core we're a collection of irrational drives so the universe is not this collection of logically perceivable ordered either in our mind if you want to take the the content method or organized by a God if you want to take the Catholic method or organized by a world spirit that is rational and going to a teleology and the Hegelian sense and he says no it's a bunch of irrational drives and that drive is manifest in all living things including things like the universe which he saw his life the planet plants animals that's all got this drive this force to exist and to reproduce and to eat and to feel things and he said this core set of drives irrational as it is is what the universe is really like and our mistake is to think otherwise so we have access to how things really are because we act have access to ourselves and the drives that we find in ourselves when we look around in the universe we should recognize as being everywhere and so you can see why I had a hard time earlier in his career because this is like you know he's attacking rationalism he's attacking the attempt to get rid of the body as a subject of contemplation he's really attacking a lot of these core fundamental principles and the implications of this are of course manifest them you know all kinds of problems or possibilities that are raised not the least of which is he said okay you have this drive the other drive to eat and so you eat this isn't temporarily you save this but the drive is not rational as soon as you've eaten after a while you'll want to eat again and then you'll want to eat again and then you're gonna want to eat again there's no saving these drives because you're irrational they have no purpose except to pursue more life they have no end goal they aren't thinking there's no past present or future and so is it the only response to this is a sort of stoicism to try to let go control and sort of abandon these drives recognize them as these irrational base of all life but don't let them control you and they said the other part of problem of this is it will create the sense of suffering because every Drive that's fulfilled will be temporary and then it will be unfulfilled and you'll need to fulfill it again and this cycle of suffering he says the only way to break the cycle of suffering is to let go of this notion of life that it that's undergirds it and then he read some Buddhism ah and he was really surprised and very gratified by the way to discover that many of the ideas that he had been working on quite desperately and he thought pretty much on his own for a couple of decades was actually very much in harmonized with much of the Buddhist thinking that was coming being translated into German at the time and so he was sort of took him aback he was like wow and so he started reading the apana shah's like like all the time like consistently the day so the last 20 years of his life he pretty much read the upon Ishod every night before he went to bed he started reading lots of Buddhist texts and it really influenced his later thinking but maybe informed is better because he felt like he had already covered this ground he thought that sort of he had independently arrived at this and was now having his ideas confirmed which made him very happy so what Schopenhauer achieves is he moves emotion drives like reproduction sexuality hunger and irrationality from things that are either bad irrelevant or just pointless to Center that's not stuff we don't talk about that's all the stuff we have to talk about because this is our only content with the world as it is because it's inside of us and it's a way it works a little bit like Hegel's world spirit we're all part of the universe so we're in the spirits in us and the spirits out there but the world spirit for Hegel is this organizing principle that's on a teleological path and subject to rational reflection and sort of an amazing drive very impersonal Hegel is like I mean Chopin I was like no no no and no that's not what we're here to talk about we're talked about the real emotions the real body not emotions in abstract sense not bodies in a sort of metaphysical averaged out over the you know your body your drives your interest where do they come from and so when he says the world as we'll what he means is the world as this collection of your rational and either irrational arrests like just rationalism doesn't matter - it drives and then representation but what you means the appearance of things so we get the world is the drives which are the real thing which we have contact with from within us and then appearance which is how the world appears to us which we don't really have access to because then we're back to the sort of the content idea we only get things through our senses and then whatever we can feel is what we can think about but God only knows what we can't feel or can't see so the examples again but when x-rays were detected and so we could do start doing you know x-rays of people all of a sudden we could see inside people's bodies which we'd never been able to do before it's not that the bones weren't there before our perceptive apparatus Justin allow us to see them or when they developed radio telescopes and one of the great discoveries in astronomy all of a sudden we used to just look at everything in the universe that had liked which turns out to be pretty much nothing I mean almost none of the universe gives off life but if you can only perceive light well you look at the universe seems like a bunch of stars and then a bunch of blackness well now that we can see the radio spin the x-rays between all of these other spectrums we realize that yeah the universe is not just a collection of little points of light it's a whole bunch of other things as well but we don't know that if our perceptual apparatus does not allow us to apprehend it except Schopenhauer argues by looking in and so he overthrows it a go like one he overthrows decart's I think therefore I am the the mind-body split he says no you're thinking in your body so you don't have that split that split does not exist just stop thinking that way he does not like that simple dualism there there your body and your thinking is working together which now of course we still struggle with this idea right we still try to like treat people like their brains in jars or you know as if they have bodies and they don't influence the mind or you know like psychology and body have no connection but on one hand we still think that way but we know that's not right so I think we're sort of even today struggling with this and show up in an hour's time this was just crazy talk right that your mind and body are connected in this visceral way that determines a lot about how you perceive the world and how the world is where people are just like well come on now now we're getting rid of the body the body doesn't matter we've we've raised ourselves above that and that just whole feeling is which is really like a cultural norm is what romanticism of course comes in and sort of blows up and that's why you know Schopenhauer was adopted wholesale by many many romantic thinkers again not least of which vogner and then many other writers and artists and musicians Camus famously later on so he brings the bodies and the emotion to the fore he blames the rationalism to the for a problem we still have what if the universe is not rational right so the notion that we should be able to think rationally about the universe rests on the notion of the universe is sort of works by these rational principles and laws that we can work out and follow some sort of human reason that is sensible Sharon R says or not or what we're doing is we're thinking about that corner of the universe that is susceptible to rational analysis and confusing ourselves by thinking that the universe if our microscope or if our telescope only picks up light then yeah you only see that little bit of the universe that is rational if you can expand your telescope to include things that aren't you can see a whole lot of other stuff and that's what Schopenhauer is trying to get us to do which is still a problem because how do you make rational arguments about irrational sort of parts of the philosophical spectrum um and I think we've lived through we're coming to the end of this by the way is for the longest time economics the United States was dominated by what was called the Chicago School of Economics and the Chicago School of Economics core argument was that human beings are rational economic actors and so they have I mean the Nobel Prize after Nobel Prize was won by the economic our school of economics people it wasn't just the University of Chicago although heavily associate with that but people working within that sort of economic philosophical mind frame and this and your humans are rational actors there's evidence of rational actors and here's how they behave and you have these models and so that's what things are going to work there was never any powerful evidence that humans were rational economic actors all of the evidence runs in the other direction we're insane with money right everybody clear on this we do stupid with money right I mean we're just nuts really I mean like crazy you know people what was it so some Japanese bank just lost ten billion dollars on this wework fiasco because some guy said oh we're worth them fortune they said okay here's ten billion dollars which they blew if you know we're just crazy I thought every level we're we do not act rationally but the problem with that is it makes economics really hard to study and so what they had done is they had said let's assume people are rational despite the evidence and study those parts of economics that we would hope would it behave rationally based on that and we'll just ignore the rest well the rest turned out to be everything right it didn't even illuminate a little bit of the universe it sort of clouded everything and now famously we have a whole new schools coming up that arguing the other way around saying we'll look people are not rational actors and that's how you have to think about it and you have to plan on that and you have to make your economic and you know social engineering plans based on the notion that people are sort of nuts with money so on one hand that sensible and the evidence supports it on the other hand it's really hard to plan for nuts right it's really hard to go okay we're gonna have an economic system that assumes that all the people in it are just like crazy right and so it's right then you're like okay what are you doing it's like uh everything gets fuzzy and difficult but Schopenhauer argued this is actually how things are and it turns out that for economic modeling purposes that's very much more accurate how do you get booms and busts and crazy investment scams and you know crit you tulipmania all this stuff is where does it come from well it comes from that we're not rational we're emotional we're a collection of drives Schopenhauer is absolutely 100% right on this which is why when Freud I said when Freud comes along and reach up an hour he's like oh my gosh he's just predicted all of the material I thought I was developing and discovering but he came at it because he was just Chopin our author on his own reading studying learning and and really arguing with the trends around him and so there it took a long time like I said it took thirty well I guess it was 30 yeah 30 years actually 30 years from when he wrote his major work to where it was generally beginning to be received and talked about and discussed he did a lot of other work in there like the short essays in such that a little reader in a second but those core principles he never varied from he really stuck with that we have limited apprehension of the universe through our senses but we have a lot because we are part of the universe and we can apprehend us from the inside as it were so where's one objects in the world we can get in and it's us and decart doesn't give you that Hegel doesn't really give you that Conte doesn't give you that and Schopenhauer makes that breakthrough but again a very difficult book to read through Ted sort of unravel it but he's much clearer by the way than Hegel or Conte I mean much clearer so I don't want to don't be confused on that front but I don't want to read one section from one of his essays so I'll give you a sense of how his essays are much clearer more Granum much more accessible right and this one is this pereira and peril of ammonia which is just Latin for omissions and appendixes emissions and appendices omissions and footnotes as it were I guess that would be a rough translation of the Latin so it's just sort of his general essays as he just was sort of ephemera as he called him pretty much himself so this is on reading he said we read another person thinks for us we merely repeat his mental process is the same as the pupil and learning to write falling with this pen the lines that have been penciled by the teacher accordingly in reading the work of thinking is for the greater part done for us this is why we are consciously relieved and we turned to reading after being occupied with our own thoughts but in reading our head is however really only the arena of someone else's thoughts and so it happens that the person who reads a great deal and that is to say almost the whole day and rec creates himself as by spending intervals and thoughtless diversion gradually loses the ability to think for himself just as a man who is always writing at last forgets how to walk such however is the case with many men of learning they have read themselves stupid or to read and everything you can see why you gotta love children you were to read in every spare moment and to read constantly is more paralyzing to the mind than constant manual work which at any rate allows one to follow one's own thoughts so we've got bunches of these right he's not a bunch of these essays this is just a selection from one essay and you can argue with him which hilarious it season I don't Didact who spent much of his life reading right so this is the first thing to note about about Schopenhauer he read just about as much as anybody is likely to ever read but he recognized the limitations of this he recognized that when you read you're taking in someone else's thoughts just like he said and if you read too much you slowly lose the ability of your own thinking right when do you put the book down say okay now I've got to think about that or think about other things and we always think oh reading is great you know far be it for me to say bad things about reading right but but I've you know I struggle with this myself I think I'm probably reading too much I have to stop reading I need to take a break from reading because it just sort of overdo when you read people like Schopenhauer Hegel or Khan or Nietzsche these powerful powerful writers they sort of take over your mind because they're so big right there's like wow wow look at these ideas like the ideas anyway where'd my mind got no idea I've lost it it just vanished right and clearly Schopenhauer had this experience himself he knew from whence he spoke but notice this is not confusing you could argue with it what's watch enough reading what's too much reading what's a mindless occupation is it really better to do endless amounts of manual labor who says the independently wealthy guy who never worked a day in his life you know I you know suspicious maybe but notice how clear and notice how consent is not confusing not difficult and it's got hundreds of short essay not hundreds probably 50 at least short essays of this level of clarity and direct involvement and really interesting ideas and so you know if you if you want to read some Schopenhauer I mean yeah knock yourself out go read the world is will and representation right I really I mean I can recommend it but just set aside you know a month or two or three or four or five or six because you know it's it's a slow go as how it needs to be read many great philosophical works need to be read that way you don't need to you know try me you can't you just can't blow through them they're not those sorts of work so my students always ask well how many pages is it and I'm like oh it's only 20 but boy it's 20 P it's those 20 pages right he's like 20 pages of a calculus textbook how long does that take you know not a day right so but there's all this other Schopenhauer which shows him as being in this misanthropic irascible hilarious engaging mind that raises all kinds of great observations another one of his essays that I like is he's on noise and so he's living in Frankfurt he lived most of his later adult life in Frankfurt brief brief sojourn he would travel all the time but but mostly in Frankfurt me and it's I just love this idea because he's in his apartment in Frankfurt off of a road not even a main road but apparently occasionally there would be wagons would come by and the wagon drivers would crack their whips on the horses and it just drove him mad he's like no man can think in a world filled with the noise of these equips and these horses and these wagons going by I'm like oh if he always alive today right look I 5 check out i-5 right look at this freeway ladies hordes look at the Jets cover over the over the top you know sort of but but that notion of just thinking about noise and what impact has in our belly to think and distraction and how youth we are to it but he came from this much quieter world but he hated any disturbance in fact he got an argument with a woman that lived next to him about she was talking too loudly on on sort of the hallway outside their apartments and so it's not clear she either fell down or he threw her down but he was in she was injured and the courts decided that he had thrown her down and so forth like 20 years he had to pay every month an indemnity to her which pissed him off and so when she died he had a party right which which I just love that she open all right there throw a lady down and then have a party when she dies yeah joke it out but but you know but it was this notion of disturbance and being bothered and being thrown out of your rut another thing important to keep in mind going back to them to Hegel and Kant in the German tradition and and somebody asked before the lecture one thing that makes the german tradition is quite interesting is while you have this mainstream tradition which because of the german investment and the universities for various reasons that we'll talk about in a future lecture there was a lot more opportunity than much of Europe you also had people like Schopenhauer basically like meetcha who abandon that tradition and people like Goethe who never were in that tradition who became thinkers of prominence without ever being in any sort of official capacity that you had both university sort of things we would recognize today you know Hagel Kant Gaspar's these kinds of people but then you had this other tradition of thinkers who weren't Holdren again Schopenhauer Nietzsche who left Goethe important thinkers important writers who just never went went for the system who just said I can't deal with the state I can't deal with the bureaucracy and so Schopenhauer does not come out of the academic world pretty much at all except to say I don't like it I want nothing to do with it he self-educated self-motivated he thought the world of ideas were important but he didn't think they needed to exist in that environment he wanted to fight that environment and work against it on one hand again easiest for him to say because he was an independent means but notice that he decided to use his independent means to further a philosophical education and to try to share his works which he was you know relatively successful at in a very slow building way and so it's quite one of the rich it's not the only reason but one of the reasons for the riches is you had these sort of parallel tracks that significant minds could run perhaps most famously of this is alexander von humboldt who was of independent means until he blew it all pursuing science and then he was of moderately independent sort of court supported means for the latter half of his right which he blew pursuing science you know and so this this that say yes but but he was certainly wasn't anybody's idea of a traditional professor or a thinker and he was you know absolutely world famous as was Schopenhauer and these other other thinkers and so there were these different paths available that today you know I don't know it's it's interesting how much we associate the the success of the humanities and the success of philosophy or literature with the 6x success of the university which the German model shows is not right because they combined for the time really incredible amounts of university possibilities relative to the time period with alternative paths and it turns out it's a dialectic or the interaction of those two very different worlds that contributed mightily so you need a Hegel on the comp but you need a Schopenhauer you need somebody outside just throwing rocks in going no I don't think so no I don't buy that Hegel by the way both Hegel and Kant if they had tried to write essays on the section philosophy of sexuality and human sex drives would have been censored and probably thrown out of their university positions rather it would have been impossible for not not that either of them seemed of the mind to do something like that but if they had they would have you know they wouldn't have had their positions look at all the trouble Freud got in a generation and a half after a generation at least after Schopenhauer is writing you know the controversy and whatnot surrounding him and so you know Schopenhauer really is this figure who represents not just again this independent thinking in this incredible philosophical insight but a whole different approach that the culture allowed and said oh yeah look at these works that are important they're valuable we'll take the wheel will respect them even though he's not at a university even though he's not working at a course even though he doesn't have these official positions and so when you look at his life in his work you're really looking at someone who's idiosyncratic and that gives them his power and his insight to talk about subjects that people didn't want to talk about to look at himself and go look I have all these drives everybody else does to that maybe that Kant didn't have those drives if you look at his history he may actually beneficial now is much more representative he's a more representative person in many ways and so when he looked at himself and examined himself and sort of extrapolated from that and had a lot more power had a great deal of heft so I should note that the final part about Schopenhauer's he did say there were ways to overcome this conflict between human reason and rationality which he recognized but being driven by drives that are the world as it really is that we experience inside of ourselves that are fundamentally irrational and he thought you know meditation and reflection was key to this which he thought was true wisdom music music he said the thing with music is which is the weird thing about music is it somehow communicates directly to us without us having to think right you don't have to think about music it just sort of moves you with no intermediary and for Schopenhauer this made music the ideal symbol of how you can resolve the drives and passions with human intellect and artistic capacity and the model that it comes up with again is this this did the power of music to transform us to move us without ever we can't figure out why I mean what why is a violin in those notes with a cello and a pian why you can ask that you can think about that but that's not the same as being moved by it right and for him it bypasses Rhys direct communication with the universe as it is was possible in music and I mentioned this egg's I think it's a beautiful concept and it does send resonate with our experience of music of how powerful it is without being like it's not representation representing anything like it like painting at the time was mostly representational and so yeah you go oh I recognize that ah world is representation not the real thing but with music it doesn't represent anything it just moves you that direct connection he thought was a direct connection to the real universe this idea is so influential that both tomas mon and hermann hesse's wrote novels for which in part they received the Nobel Prizes for literature in separate years based on this concept of music they both had future composers as the central characters pondering the nature of music dr. Faustus and the glass bead game right that that how how do you understand this ineffable power and how does it tie in to the human and for Conte and hegel hegel would let you do it a little bit with the world's bear Carla has no place for that show says no this is real this is human this is powerful this is central so all the stuff that other people want to push away sexuality desire food anger music Cho Panera wants to pull and say no this is the stuff of philosophy this is what we should be looking at and so when you think about a composer like Beethoven I mean Schopenhauer this just made for Schopenhauer right and so when the romantics get a hold of of Brahms and and Beethoven and vogner and very you know they're just like they go mad they're like oh this is great and this informs like the central concept of German Romanticism and European romantic thought for a century at least after Schopenhauer's death so these core concepts that now we almost take for granted hugely controversial and Chopin's Howard a Chopin hours day but he articulated him really clearly slowly built through his life and then when you get the breakthrough with someone like vogner and then people really start paying attention you know that then Freud here it is right they starts flowing out into the world and so that's what I like you you'll hear Schopenhauer's a misanthrope which is probably true but and if you read him it's pretty much true but he was a misanthrope who loved the nature of people it's a weird combination he didn't turn away from mankind he said no we are these weird rational collection of bizarre drives it gets us into all kinds of trouble and that's the truth right and that's that's the philosophical truth that we should be looking at not abstract rational reason capital-t truth timeless unchanging forms but this blind irrational striving for life and reproduction and music that makes the human world but it is and makes all over the world what it is so yeah Schopenhauer thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Wes Cecil

Views: 19,528

Rating: 4.8727636 out of 5

Keywords: Wes Cecil, Humanearts, Schopenhauer, Idealists, German Philosophy, Romanticism, Lecture

Id: WP20RHlX6d4

Length: 52min 11sec (3131 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019