19: Arthur Schopenhauer, part 2: The Great Pessimist

This is the Schopenhauer Hour. pain and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on the earth as on the moon and if, here is there, the surface were still in a crystalline condition. You can look upon our life as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness.

In any case, even he who has found life tolerably bearable will, the longer he lives, feel the more clearly that on the whole it is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.

if two men who were friends in youth meet an old age after a lapse of an entire generation the principal feeling the sight of one another linked as it is with the recollections of earlier years will arouse in both will be one of total disappointment with the whole of life which once lay so fair before them and the rosy dawn of youth promised so much and performed so little end quote

That's from the essay on the suffering of the world from section nine. I wanted to start with the unrestrained, unadulterated, absolutely life-denying side of Schopenhauer this week. Someone say.

Hence his only side. But if you've been following along since the last episode, hopefully I made at least some impression about how Schopenhauer is, you know, he's willing to restrain his attitude of absolute sorrow and lamentation uh at least within the context of his rigorous philosophical arguments in order to lay out his picture of the world and his picture of human life within that world to give his epistemological framework for philosophizing and his ontological claims

um about you know what the world really is we went through um i would say a very methodical in tone first couple of books last week um the world is both our representation of it Because that is how we come to know anything about the world of objects and phenomena, and the laws governing that world. And the world is will, because the will is our...

insight into the thing in itself, into the inner character of all those objects and laws. But Schopenhauer's ethical conclusions from this picture of the world turn towards an attitude of complete cynicism and the idea that life itself is not worth living insofar as there are any ethical imperatives for us while in this life it is to achieve a negation or denial of the will

And the reason as given is that this world is fundamentally an aimless thing, which is ruled by suffering. As we discussed at the end of the last episode, as far as Schopenhauer sees it, the will is never satisfied. It may satisfy an individual aim, but its nature is willing, not satisfaction. And so as soon as the individual aims are fulfilled, the willing goes on in the form of new.

desires new willing phenomena new objectifications new pursuits new hunger i remember he says it is a hungry will ever hungry it's a hunger that can never be satiated

And thus, the inherent character of our existence is one of endless frustration and dissatisfaction. So in this episode, part two, it may even be darker than the last one. But also, this episode is going to contain Schopenhauer's gospel, which, you know, gospel, of course, means good news, which is a bit funny to say in the context of how dark Schopenhauer's philosophy is.

but his good news is the denial of the will that we mentioned um which uh is only possible for human beings why is that well skipping back into section seven

of the same essay on the suffering of the world, Schopenhauer writes how knowledge creates greater suffering than before. Just to recap briefly, you know, we were talking last time about how everything in the world is will, that includes... in organic objects plants animals human beings and so on um and so only human beings can negate the will but the will is just as manifest in you know the behavior of animals as well but um

Human beings possess greater knowledge. And so he writes how knowledge creates greater suffering. He does say that knowledge in and of itself is painless, but what knowledge brings us is the ability to illumine. the character of the will and so schopenhauer writes quote will is the string its frustration or impediment the vibration of the string knowledge the sounding board

So pain increases with the awareness created by knowledge. He says that knowledge also increases our capacity for pleasure, but only by little.

compared with how much more suffering we now are able to be aware of you might say to comprehend and after all this heightened capacity for suffering for the kinds of suffering that only a being like us a human being the brain with complex desires and goals and a self-image the kind of suffering that only we can have this is a type of sublime more complex suffering

that is what gives us this push to seek for an end to this world of willing the highest gradation of the will mankind has the most pronounced suffering but man's knowledge

also exists precisely the gradation at which there exists the possibility of the denial of the will and so he writes um and this is in that same section of the essay section 7 quote At each higher stage of animal life, there is a corresponding increase in pain, and the lowest animals is extremely slight, but even in the highest, it nowhere approaches the pain which man is capable of feeling. since even the highest animals lack thought and concepts.

and it is right that this capacity for pain should reach its zenith only where by virtue of the existence of reason there also exists the possibility of denial of the will for otherwise it would be nothing but aimless And so there's this promise of the ability to deny the will here. He quotes a saying from Ecclesiastes. This is in World is Will and Representation, actually. He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. That's from Ecclesiastes.

So he says that even in the plant, we can recognize a ceaseless, restless striving. We can see that, you know, he thinks that's sort of represented, so to speak, in how the growth of even things like plants. But because plants have no sentience, they have no pain, at least in the way that we would think of pain. The sentience gained by higher objectifications of the will enhances pain. And one way it does this is by increasing finitude, you might say.

So even though we exist in limitless time and space under Schopenhauer's ontology, the human being finds himself to be finite, projected into this individual lifetime. And every... life is always sliding towards death at every moment all individuated existence is considered from the ultimate perspective a constant continuous dying

He writes, you know, constant push of all things into death. And the human being is the most aware of this out of any of the individuated phenomenon. And we're among the most individuated, right? Because a man, each man... constitutes his own special platonic form in schopenhauer's view and so we need the intellect to have true pain that a human being is capable the result of this however is that man becomes able to conceive of the denial of the will and he actually sees

that it's reasonable to deny the will and so schopenhauer writes this is in book 4 section 56 quote for this reason we wish to consider in human existence the inner and essential destiny of the will Everyone will readily find the same thing once more in the life of the animal, only more feebly expressed in various degrees. He can also sufficiently convince himself in the suffering animal world how essentially...

all life is suffering, end quote. So our greater knowledge, the will is just blindly striving on normally, but with the gradation of human beings, of the will um we gain this insight into suffering and the more clear and precise our resolution to the nature of the world the more we become aware of this inevitable fact and so we ask how can we end that suffering human beings are the first being that's capable of asking that question and schopenhauer's

answer to it is the negation of the will and the idea that this might be a kind of salvation for mankind um what's interesting to me here is that schopenhauer has effectively provided

an atheistic argument that still makes the existence of a person's life meaningful in a teleological sense. As in, your life is... or can be lived for a purpose it isn't just over when you die so who cares um and because as he writes the will will continue to go on in its blind striving causing all this pain unless human beings take it upon themselves as a moral duty to stop striving stop willing to exist and this the kind of salvation offered cannot be mentioned uh without raising a comparison

Buddhism here. There's the idea of the arahant, as they say in the Theravada tradition, which is another word for what we might call a saint. It's not really a good translation, but it's the closest thing we can probably get in English. Or in the Mahayana tradition, they would talk about an enlightened Buddha.

by the time of the mahayana there's a lot of buddhas um schopenhauer was of course uh you know he was influenced by this religious ideal coming from the east of an individual through correct action and through a whole course of mental and moral training the the idea that an individual could stop their craving stop desiring stop willing

And by that token, you gain an exit to the world of incarnation and suffering. And in Buddhism, for example, the stakes are very clear. Human life is incredibly valuable. Because being born as a human on the great wheel of becoming is said to be very rare. You could be born as an animal or a ghost or as one of the sufferers in hell or as a deva or an asura.

um but only humans have the ability to train and reach enlightenment and so schopenhauer's idea of the person using reason to stop desiring and thus to deny the will to exist is a perfect parallel to the buddhist idea of enlightenment becoming free of tana which is thirsting or craving by letting go of all desires the buddhist is you know

The Buddhist doctrine is that you'll be able to stop incarnating into all these cycles of becoming, which in Buddhism is called samsara. And then you have the enlightenment aspect as well in Buddhism, the idea of achieving nirvana.

uh which you could translate as the extinguishment of all desire all clinging um and the argument in buddhism is that that clinging that desiring that's it's the clinging to becoming that keeps you um being reborn into becoming within this dependent existence um and so the parallels are very clear the influence is very clear um on uh schopenhauer ethically that he is

putting buddhism into a western philosophical system schopenhauer outlines in book three um the means of achieving or a means of achieving liberation from the blind striving nature of the will But he uses means which are not aesthetic, but aesthetic. For Schopenhauer, the direct exit from the will exists in art, creation of art, contemplation of art.

Schopenhauer has a very unique interpretation of what art is and what the aesthetic experience is and what the value of aesthetics are. It's actually one I very much disagree with. So it's a view that influenced Nietzsche, though, very greatly. And Nietzsche criticized this view, too, but he, when we get on to talking about Nietzsche's aesthetics... In many ways, you could see it as a modification or a transformation, a critical update on Schopenhauer's work, you might say.

Schopenhauer's views on art unifies several threads of Schopenhauer's thought that we laid out in the last episode. They all kind of weave together. when he's considering art and aesthetics in book three so there's the problem of the wills eternal striving and the suffering this causes there is the need of finding some means of denying the will

in order to gain liberation from that suffering. There's the discussion of the Platonic forms or the Platonic ideals that we brought into it and how they fit into this whole... this whole philosophy and finally the question of what practical form this philosophy will take that incorporates all these elements and all of these threads are woven together in schopenhauer's view on art

schopenhauer writes in section 49 quote the object of art the depiction of which is the aim of the artist and the knowledge of which must consequently precede his work as its germ and source is an idea in plato's sense and absolutely nothing else not the particular thing the object of common comprehension and not the concept the object of rational thought and of science

And that's from actually near the end of book three, but it sums up the overall view he gives of art, that the platonic idea is what is being depicted and contemplated in art, and that the contemplation of the platonic idea is...

in itself the liberation from the suffering caused by the will um so now i guess i'll have to outlay the argument as to how he gets there because it requires some explanation so he begins book three with a recapitulation to the idea that he has, you know, discovered this agreement between Plato and Kant and how even though...

People have pointed out the differences between the philosophies of Plato and Kant or framed their philosophical ideas in different ways. I mean, and they both talked about them in a very different language. Ultimately, Schopenhauer believes that both men pointed to the same fundamental truth.

which is discoverable by reason, and that Plato's ideas identify something which is not strictly phenomena nor thing in itself. That is to say, will's gradations the different patterns and levels at which the will objectifies itself which schopenhauer calls the forms he says they are not the thing in itself but they're a unique category of representation which are not subject to the laws

of, you know, impermanence and plurality, like all other phenomena would be. So to explain what this means, we'll defer to Schopenhauer, book three, section 32, quote.

The Platonic idea is necessarily object, something known, a representation, and precisely, but only in this respect, is it different from the thing in itself. It has laid aside merely the subordinate forms of the phenomenon and all of which we include under the principle of sufficient reason or rather it has not yet entered into them but it has retained the first and most universal form

namely that of the representation in general that of being object for a subject it is the form subordinate to this the general expression of which is the principle of sufficient reason which multiply the idea in particular in fleeting individuals, whose number in respect to the idea is a matter of complete indifference. End quote. Then skipping down a little bit in the passage before continuing.

quote between it and the thing in itself the idea still stands as the only direct objectivity of the will since it has not assumed any other form peculiar to knowledge as such except that of the representation in general i.e., that of being object for a subject. Therefore, it alone is the most adequate objectivity possible of the will, or of the thing in itself. Indeed, it is even the whole thing in itself.

only under the form of representation. Here lies the ground of the agreement between Plato and Kant, although in strict accuracy that of which they both speak is not the same."

So as Schopenhauer said in the past episode, or as we talked about Schopenhauer saying in the past episode, the gradations of the will's objectification, which he considers to be the same as platonic forms, are natural laws and forces. inorganic matter, plants, animals, finally mankind. Each individual person stands for his own special individualized platonic idea. And so each phenomenon is a particular pattern within the material world.

that the will can take the platonic form you might consider a blueprint for all of the individual phenomena that exist um So to put this into words that a secularist or a materialist can understand, because there's the obvious objection, right? That the idea of a platonic form, the reason why many of us modern people reject that idea is because... It's not obvious how that works in practical reality, right? It also suggests a sort of teleology for organisms and natural phenomena.

that it may seem unjustified to claim. But let's put it into different language. In the case of biological evolution, we have examples in the fossil record. And insofar... from what we know of mapping the genome of the animal kingdom, that certain types of animals independently evolve into the same forms. You might remember there were some pop science articles recently about how... a lot of species just end up evolving into crabs. There's actually a name for this. It's called carcinization.

It's an evolutionary pattern followed over and over again by crustaceans. A species mutates from a non-crab-like form into a crab-like form, obviously over many, many generations. but it happens over and over again. This is a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. There are other examples of it, but let's think about what the phenomenon of convergent evolution implies.

We know that certain material forms and certain genetic combinations from this example, what you might call a certain biological pattern, is selected for by the process of natural selection. What's ultimately selected for is survivability from a Darwinian perspective, or if you believe in Nietzschean evolution, what's selected for is power. From my perspective, you could...

Regardless, two terms is largely referring to the same thing. But in any case, certain patterns are more survivable than others. And we know from convergent evolution that it isn't totally random and senseless. and that what patterns survive is it's not totally based on chance we know that the environment will sometimes produce the same patterns meaning that

Multiple organisms with different genomes move towards that same pattern. Another way of saying this is that certain patterns are implied by the physical conditions. which means certain patterns are implied by reality. Reality itself, in a blind, unconscious process, produces situations into which certain patterns emerge to fulfill those situations so the pressures on crustaceans tend to push them toward the pattern or what we might call the platonic idea

of the crab. Carcinization is crustaceans realizing the platonic form of the crab, that is the ideal crustacean. And so to Schopenhauer, the platonic form is even more real than the individual example of the species. Again, using the platonic idea here, referring to platonic ideas.

different animals and this is because the individuals come and go but this has no bearing on the pattern as we see in the example of carcinization even the whole species sometimes goes but the pattern still calls the objects of the world into that same form the pattern exists independently of whether the individual survive or not we could extrapolate this to mean that

Every single phenomenon which comes into being does so in response to the conditions set by materiality producing this possibility for it to exist. To speak metaphysically. That's reality willing something to exist. And the most real form of phenomenal existence is as the possibility itself rather than the individual phenomena, as we've said, the pattern.

To use an example from astronomy, individual stars exist, but stars are born and eventually stars die. So now our modern materialist thinking says... that the world is a world of objects and that the stars, the actual individual stars, those are the real phenomena, right? Schopenhauer's opposite perspective to this might be akin to saying, no, the real phenomenon

is the process of star formation itself. The conditions that produce stars, no matter what, once those conditions come into alignment, you will get stars. That is what is real. And that is what we can represent with the math behind star formation, what you might call the discovery of a pattern in nature itself. And the Schopenhauerian argument might be to liken...

The math behind star formation to a platonic idea of a star. It's not the math itself, of course. The math is just another series of symbols of representation. within a language we've all invented together as humans. But it's the actual physical processes to which the math refers. The conditions of reality that don't just produce... That's too weak of a word. The conditions that necessitate that there are stars. The pattern emerges to fill that void, to fill the need or the will of reality.

And so this is the relationship between the Platonic ideas and what we class as like an ordinary representation. The other representations are subject to the principle of sufficient reason, as Schopenhauer calls it. you know subject and object causality time space and so on the platonic ideas are not subject to this in the same way they only exist within that world of subject and object because they're still as he says in that quote we read

There's still things that it's our way of representing the thing in itself to ourselves. So it's still a representation. But in the Platonic ideas, we can behold objectification itself, the object itself. And it's in contemplating the idea of something, the pattern of something, that we can regard a phenomena or a representation that does not stir the will within us.

The patterns themselves are the most directly known objects, but they're not objects of the will. Speaking here of our individualized peculiar goals and desires, a man doesn't desire the pattern of a woman. you know the platonic idea of a woman necessitated by the evolutionary and biological reality of you know having a species of the male and female sex manifest in human beings which exists beyond any individual woman

No, a straight man desires the individual woman, not the pattern. And it's not the pattern itself that can injure you or that you can suffer from a want of. Since we suffer... from external stimuli the external suffering can only come to us from objects that exist within the principle of sufficient reason you know individuated things and beings that we come into contact with in this world of

you know, struggles between the will. The platonic idea, the pattern itself does not partake in reality in that same way. And so this is Schopenhauer's entry point for the liberation.

from our enslavement to our desires. Um, and that liberation comes from within artistic contemplation. He describes the basis of this process in section 34, where he says that quote, knowledge tears itself free from the service of the will precisely by the subject ceasing to be merely individual and being now a pure will-less subject of knowledge end quote

So this is the role of knowledge in negating the will. Knowledge evolved in service of the will. We gained our knowledge in order to perpetuate the will to exist and its cravings. But by using this knowledge... we can undermine the very thing that brought it into being and uh he elaborates a little further down in that same passage quote raised up by the power of the mind

we relinquish the ordinary way of considering things and cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason merely their relations to one another whose final goal is always the relation to our own will

Thus we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the wither in things, but simply and solely the what. Further, we do not let abstract thought, the concepts of reason, take possession of our consciousness but instead of all this devote the whole power of the mind to perception sink ourselves completely therein and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation

the natural object actually present whether it be a landscape a tree a rock a crag a building or anything else we lose ourselves entirely in this object to use a pregnant expression in other words we forget our individuality our will and continue to exist only as pure subject a clear mirror of the object

so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception but the two have become one since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied

by a single image of perception." I have a lot to say about this passage. For one, this kind of This idea of disinterested contemplation works with both the Eastern idea of meditation and at least some dimension of what we mean by the appreciation of art in the West. But I think that Schopenhauer is therefore narrowing.

a definition of art in a sense to exclude some things that other people might consider as art such that at the very least we could just say his idea of a truly aesthetic experience or of truly aesthetic creativity, would involve only the art which is done from that place of selfless perception and contemplation of the object. And speaking as an artist myself, that is not my experience with art.

um but i do think the view of art he's outlining here is contained within nietzsche's later idea of the apollonian and i think that's why he had to invent the dionysian as a counterbalance because nietzsche believe that this view of art did not contain the whole of the artistic experience. You know, there's something orgiastic and indulgent about the musical or revelrous sides of art, for example.

but schopenhauer's conception of art applies i think more mostly to the visual arts to drama to poetry sculpture painting architecture things of that nature plastic arts language arts visual arts but Let's set that aside for a moment. Suppose that whatever we want to say about art and the aesthetic experience overall, because I know that'll be a contentious topic, Schopenhauer is pointing to some real phenomenon.

That can be achieved by art, just as it could be achieved by Eastern meditation. And to be honest, you know, you could interpret the passage above or the one I just read. in the most general terms, to be a form of meditation that he's describing. Most meditative activities involve fixing the mind on a single discernible object on which the awareness is totally focused.

And so even though thoughts usually arise, the meditator has to simply let them pass and not attach to them and instead continually return his focus to the object of meditation, which is what Schopenhauer advises. He says not to... We're not going to entertain conceptual thoughts. And a common experience that meditators report when doing a mantra meditation, where they repeat the same mantra over and over again, is that eventually the words lose all meaning.

And one can have a sense of losing oneself, as Schopenhauer puts it here, losing the subject-object distinction. He uses the metaphor of being a... a clear mirror that simply reflects the perception of the object. Funnily enough, this is like the same metaphor used in the famous Zen Buddhist story of the poetry contrast between Shenhui and Huynang.

uh huinang's favorite famous poem in that story um he uses the metaphor of the mind as a mirror quote the mind is the bodhi tree the body is the bright mirror's stand And so in that poem, you know, they... The body, the thing that perceives the sense information, right? All comes through the sense organs of the body. It's just a... The body is the bright mirror's stand, but the mirror is originally clean and pure.

And dust, you know, in the Buddhist tradition, when they talk about dust, that's like your attachment or clinging that comes in through the senses.

schopenhauer goes on in the uh the passage we were just talking about to quote from uh byron who wrote quote are not the mountains waves and skies a part of me and of my soul as i of them end quote which is also interesting because you you hear that same kind of language in a lot of zen buddhist stories but schopenhauer writes of these lines by byron that quote

Whoever has in the manner stated become so absorbed and lost in the perception of nature that he exists only as a purely knowing subject, becomes in this way immediately aware that, as such, he is the condition and hence the supporter of the world and of all objective existence for this now shows itself as dependent on his existence he therefore draws nature into himself so that he feels it to be only an accident of his own being

end quote so through the absorption into pure perception one can lose themselves as the subject and momentarily become will-less he likens this state of mind to the one most highly prized by epicurus he believes this is a state possible for the enlightened philosopher here using the term enlightened quite differently from the buddhist sense although i'm sure there

both concepts probably swam around in schopenhauer's mind this is in section 38 quote it is the state where simultaneously and inseparably the perceived individual thing is raised to the idea of its species and the knowing individual to the pure subject of will is knowing and now the two as such no longer stand in the stream of time and of all other relations end quote

So Schopenhauer believed that this state is possible through art or perhaps through, we might extend that to aesthetic practice in Eastern meditation. And as a result, when you begin to look at the world and that means of perception, The world becomes this fleeting, dreamlike existence. And just to bring it back to why somebody might want to achieve this state that he's describing.

We're the world-only representation, as he says in the second book. Were it only representation and nothing besides, it would simply pass us by and we wouldn't even notice it. But it's our will that fills the world and all the objects of the world with meaning and causes all of our striving and suffering. It's not the platonic idea of an object that makes you suffer, as we said.

And so you focus on that, the pure representation, rather than on the individual targets and desires of your will, which will only continue you. suffering because you know your pursuit of the will's desires only ever leads to suffering so schopenhauer continues in section 38 quote all willing springs from lack from deficiency and thus from suffering fulfillment brings this to an end yet for one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied further desiring lasts a long time

demands and requests go on to infinity fulfillment is short and meted out sparingly but even the final satisfaction itself is only apparent the wish fulfilled at once makes its way for a new one the former is a known delusion the latter a delusion not as yet known no attained object of willing can give a satisfaction that lasts and no longer declines but it is always like the alms thrown to a beggar which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow

So that was just to recap again that desires do lead to suffering invariably and without fail. The will always leads to suffering. So the results of following any course of action is ultimately disappointment.

um you know further down in the passage he compares mankind to one lying on the revolving wheel of ixion or to the eternally thirsting tantalus both examples from greek mythology and this is apropos of the buddhist uh outlook wherein as the you know dwellers in samsara our lives are at least somewhat hellish uh you know um and we've all been incarnated into hell in the past in buddhist cosmology and likely will again in the future schopenhauer really does mean that our our striving

in this world is akin to being like sisyphus in the here and now pushing a heavy boulder uphill to no point and no purpose completely in vain and prolonging his own suffering the harder he strives and so after learning um all this about schopenhauer it may surprise you to know his favorite style of art were the dutch realist painters

Schopenhauer writes, they were the type of artists who brought forth this opportunity for negating the will and becoming the pure willless subject that they perfected this. This is also from section 38, quote, inward disposition predominance of knowing over willing can bring about this state in any environment this is shown by those admirable dutchmen who directed such purely objective perception to the most insignificant objects

and set up a lasting monument of their objectivity and spiritual peace and paintings of still life the aesthetic beholder does not contemplate this without emotions for it graphically describes to him the calm tranquil will-free frame of mind of which the artist which was necessary for contemplating such insignificant things subjectively considering them so attentively and repeating this perception with such thought

since the picture invites the beholder to participate in this state his emotion is often enhanced by the contrast between it and his own rest restless state of mind disturbed by vehement willing in which he happens to be In the same spirit, landscape painters, especially Roosdale, have often painted extremely insignificant landscape objects and have thus produced the same effect even more delightfully.

And so it's almost as if he's trying to describe the most boring type of art possible. Now, I'm not knocking still life paintings, nor am I knocking a landscape painting of an insignificant landscape, as he puts it. I like paintings of simple and small. things, but something about the way he describes it is just so contrary to what I find intriguing about art. It's like he thinks the relevant thing about a piece of art is whether one can get into the

the mind state of the kind of care and attention to something so neutral and insignificant. And so art for Schopenhauer is about becoming that mirror where you are completely reflecting the objectivity of something. So I think that would be the most generous way to put it. Maybe some artists out there will maybe understand that. But in any case, as a meditative exercise, as a very specific way to engage with art, I think it's worth...

And so, in any case, this is where Schopenhauer brings in the concept of genius. Genius, of course, shares an etymological root with the word genie in English, or that's djinn in Arabic.

And so we use the term genius for someone who has breakthrough insights that seemingly come out of nowhere, just like the power of the genie seemingly comes out of nowhere and works as if by magic. In Schopenhauer's conception of genius, the genius is the person... is capable of comprehending the ideas the platonic ideas independently of the individual entities of that idea

The genius is the ability for representing the idea itself without the plurality and the impermanence and strife caused by being subject to the principle of sufficient reason, like all the individuated phenomena. phenomena of an idea are and thus the person with genius is capable of becoming this pure willless subject of knowing and so the degree to which genius uh you know

Geniuses in the common parlance is perceived to come from outside the subject. Someone has a light bulb moment. Where does it come from? This folk wisdom is because geniuses... It's experienced as pure knowing in the moment of genius, and you don't know where it came from. Schopenhauer's explanation for this is that...

You know, the true genius is empty of their own individuated will in their moment of genius. And he also says this is why madness and the arts are always correlated. And in Schopenhauer's explanation, it's because, quote, the impression of the present moment on them is very strong and carries them away into thoughtless actions into emotion and passion end quote

that's from section 36 where he likens the madness of the artistic or philosophical genius to plato's enlightened man who has freed himself from the cave quote those who outside the cave have seen true sunlight and the things that actually are the ideas cannot afterwards see within the cave anymore because their eyes have grown unaccustomed to the darkness end quote so

this is the role of the artist um not although you know the term genius could be applied to anyone capable of purely absorbing themselves and the activity of the mind without their individual will becoming involved You know, Schopenhauer has very peculiar views on art and some unusual definitions, to say the least. But where it's most useful is in how the idea of will-less contemplation figures into his philosophy.

and that is as an activity of religious importance we might say or metaphysical importance and such an encounter with aesthetic beauty that completely enraptures you in willless contemplation is what schopenhauer calls the sublime such an object of aesthetic contemplation that can put you into this state is itself sublime he says thus we have a definition of beauty

that comes along with Schopenhauer's aesthetics, which he finds in the sublime, and he can therefore hold up as the teleological end of all artistic activity. Schopenhauer's theory of aesthetics

also includes natural beauty as well as man-made, and he writes extensively about how the natural world can call you into the world of the sublime. He writes in section 39, quote, let us transport ourselves to a very very lonely region of boundless horizons under a perfectly cloudless sky trees and plants and the perfectly motionless air no animals no human beings

no moving masses of water the profoundest silence such surroundings are as it were a summons to seriousness to contemplation with complete emancipation from all willing and its cravings but is just this that gives to such a scene of mere solitude and profound peace a touch of the sublime end quote This is why Schopenhauer is sometimes classed as a romantic. Romanticism is one of those funny words because it means a bunch of different things, some of which are contradictory.

I think this is because we usually judge romanticism by the resultant attitude created by a given philosophy. So like the result, right? The effect.

rather than the cause, so less on the rigorous analysis of a given philosophy's tenets. Schopenhauer produced a philosophy in which the immersion in nature is synonymous with finding peace and absorption into pure contemplation of the object and so he's by that token romantic because he's literally saying the way to salvation from the striving and strife of the world is through the feelings that nature stirs in us

So Schopenhauer has, of course, been called by far scarier names than that of a romantic, though. He's been called the great pessimist. And... I want to get into one of the most pessimistic aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy. It's one that sets him apart. Unlike some pessimists, such as Lugoti or Ceyron, or David Benatar, Schopenhauer does not see man's mortality as the central depressing fact of his existence, because Schopenhauer is in some sense actually darker than that.

For Schopenhauer, if death was merely the end of our existence, that would be a form of salvation from the endless suffering of the world in and of itself, right? But Schopenhauer doesn't believe that we escape this samsara of willing. merely through dying. I'm not trying to trivialize those other pessimists, by the way. The horror and pain in Sioran, for example. His work is a very...

Poetic attempt to confront the void at the end of consciousness. You know, for Ligoti, the knowledge of time and our mortality is, again, the central problem. For Schopenhauer, however, the problem... does not end with the death of any individual phenomenon of the will. Our concern with the problem doesn't even end with our own death. For Schopenhauer, the problem is not death.

the problem is life life is suffering the world is the will to live in its various incarnate forms an endless push to continue to exist In whatever state you're in. Every individual pattern in its little states. Forever willing and never having satisfaction. And never succeeding.

And an end to this cycle of suffering is exactly what Schopenhauer thinks we must find through philosophy and aesthetics and aesthetic practice, which means he's in lockstep again with the Buddhists here who don't believe.

There is an easy way out of samsara by dying because of the doctrine of rebirth. And I have so much to say on this that I can't elaborate further without derailing the episode, but I'll just say it's very telling that the Western... secular Buddhists that we have here in America, when they convert, they don't typically want to accept the idea of rebirth when they convert to Buddhism, even though...

rebirth is more or less a universal in the beliefs of buddhists all over the world um and yet here you know american buddhists are always quick to tell you it's something you don't quote have to believe And of course, we don't want to believe that because American Buddhists are looking for, you know, they're looking for a way out of their suffering and recharacterizing existence itself as this truly inescapable suffering, I think would be too demoralizing.

But so Schopenhauer begins book four by addressing mortality, and he points out how our concern with mortality has driven mankind in every civilization to adopt... complex sometimes costly rituals and representations associated with death he particularly praises the hindu conception of the godhead's trinity which includes brahma who symbolizes a generation

Vishnu, who symbolizes preservation, and Shiva, who symbolizes destruction, appearing as he does with the necklace of skulls and the lingam. But he also notes the costly Roman sarcophagi. We could also include all the holidays of death that we talked about in the Halloween episode we did recently. But so Schopenhauer writes in section 54, quote,

is time, space, and causality. And through these, individuation, which requires that the individual must come into being and pass away. But this no more disturbs the will to live, the individual being only a particular example or specimen so to speak of this phenomenon of will then does the death of an individual injure the whole of nature for it is not the individual that nature cares for but only the species

and in all seriousness she urges the preservation of the species since she provides so lavishly through the immense surplus of the seed and the great strength of the fructifying impulse the individual on the contrary has no value to nature and can have none for finite time infinite space and the infinite number of possible individuals therein are her kingdom

Therefore, nature is always ready to let the individual fall, and the individual is accordingly not only exposed to destruction in a thousand ways from the most insignificant accidents, but is even destined for this and is led towards it by nature herself from the moment that individual has served the maintenance of the species. In this way, nature quite openly expresses the great truth that only ideas, not individuals.

have reality proper in other words are a complete objectivity of the will end quote um so schopenhauer mentioned shiva as i said before But this depiction of nature using female pronouns for nature, as he does throughout the passage we just quoted, reminds me a great deal of Kali, Shiva's wife.

or really any depictions of the monstrous feminine, or, you know, the many underworld goddesses of ancient times. Schopenhauer is basically hammering home that his individuals living as part of this phenomenal world. We're subject to these laws of causality and individuation and thus mortality. We're not like the platonic ideas. And that means they're more real than we ever can be.

even though individual human beings have their own special archetype but that archetype that pattern of you in theory is even more real than you are as a willing subject because the willing subject that exists as an individual thing

you know strives after other objectified individual things in the world and that thing will die and that's unavoidable um but here we have to remember these two worlds that schopenhauer is standing in because On the one hand, all being is indivisible and eternally indestructible. And on the other hand, being exists as all these individual things that are constantly being recycled.

Part of his argument as to how you can deny the will to live is to, part of what you're doing is recognizing that eternal indestructibility of being and reflecting it simply like a mirror. And so Schopenhauer, he goes on to argue that it's irrational to fear death because it's only if one fully embraces life and is satisfied with life as it is that you can fear for the end of life.

But Schopenhauer thinks that's a delusional attitude. And he thinks it's one that your life will eventually disabuse you of. That would be the short argument. But he writes in section 54, of man's paradoxical attitude towards death, which I find very fascinating. Quote, Everything is entirely in nature, and she is entirely in everything. She has her center in every animal.

the animal has certainly found its way into existence just as it will certainly find its way out of it meanwhile it lives fearlessly and heedlessly in the presence of annihilation supported by the consciousness that it is nature herself and is as imperishable as she man alone carries with him in abstract concepts the certainty of his own death

yet this can frighten him only very rarely and at particular moments when some occasion calls it up to the imagination against the mighty voice of nature reflection can do little in man as in the animal that does not think there prevails a lasting state of mind that certainty springing from innermost consciousness that he is nature the world itself by virtue of this End quote.

So that's curious to me. It's very intuitive to me in some sense, and yet it flies in the face of the common wisdom that the fear of death is this universal and pervasive influential force in the human psyche. Schopenhauer suggests here that...

we don't in common practice find ourselves bothered by death. That the nature of existence is essentially for the individual will to focus its attention just on its immediate goals and desires and go on striving that way as though it was going to continue forever.

And his explanation for this is that deep down, we have an immediate knowledge that we're all part and parcel with the will and nothing is really going to end when we go into death. Our conceptual and religious frameworks for dealing with death. are these mere abstract concepts. It's a way to put those thoughts off in a box so we can continue laboring in the service of the will. The individual phenomenon dies, but it was an unreal dreamlike phantasm anyway.

Many religions have this idea that in death you're returning to this primordial unity. Or in modern Christianity, returning to your communion with God, however you want to put it. Comes a little difficult at this point to explain what Schopenhauer thinks happens after death. And on some level you might ask, you know, what is he an expert? Why is he speaking about this? But except to say he thinks of things...

Basically, I guess following his epistemology through to its logical conclusions, he thinks that speaking of things happening, quote unquote, after death is like a category confusion almost. So we exist temporally.

while we're representing the world, right? Because time is a function or an aspect of the world as representation. But he believes that if we're talking about time when the representation stops, by definition all you are is the thing in itself we would return to the thing in itself which continues on in its blind striving and yeah he quotes the vedas here um and

his footnotes a section where it apparently says that when a man dies his various sense faculties become one with the various things of the world his visual faculty becomes one with the sun His sense of smell with the earth, his hearing with the air, his speech with fire, and so on. This is not supposed to be taken literally, but Schopenhauer sees a lot of these ancient writings as prefiguring.

more sophisticated logical insights that would come later. So he holds to Plato's idea that learning is remembering, that we can... We recall these eternal insights into the nature of things, perhaps through genius, you might say. And so men throughout time have had the insight that death is not, quote unquote, the end.

But it's difficult to express because by exiting our consciousness and not representing the world anymore, you don't go somewhere else after death. We cease to exist as separate things in space and time, but go on as part of the indestructible chain of being.

there's not really like a language to talk about this um but uh so he writes in section 54 quote for it is true that everyone is transitory only as phenomenon but on the other hand as thing in itself he is timeless and so endless but also only as phenomenon is the individual different

from the other things of the world as thing in itself he is the will that appears in everything and death does away with the illusion that separates his consciousness from that of the rest this is future existence or immortality

So it's on this account that Schopenhauer doesn't think that we might find a solution to the problem of life through, say, suicide. Life is the character of the will to live. It will go on living. It doesn't matter to the will what fleeting dreamlike forms decide to end themselves, whether they live or pass away. None of that has any bearing on the world as will.

In his essay, The Indestructibility of Being, Schopenhauer clarifies a little that he doesn't believe in rebirth in the sense of one soul going on into new incarnations.

he takes some view which i would call a little bit more authentically buddhist than that actually um which he classifies as palingenesis and he writes his quote the decomposition and reconstruction of the individual in which will alone persists and assuming the shape of a new being receives a new intellect end quote so that's very similar again to the buddhist picture of samsara and the way that works is uh cheetah the mind stream

or you know the particular vector you might say of one's will or desire or ego continually takes on new shapes in accord with its past karma so long as that karma is not exhausted So it's not reincarnation in the sense that your soul dies and then you or your individuality, some kind of individual soul transmigrates from thing to thing. It's on a more fundamental level than that.

How would I put it? Without getting too new agey, the best way to say it is Schopenhauer really does believe you contain the whole universe and the whole universe is you. And the part that's not new agey is that it's a suffered... you know, suffering, tortured universe and, um, ending the one individual life while not in its suffering. But, you know, again, as he says above that, the distinctions between you and everything else are an illusion. Um, and so.

Again, this is kind of almost beyond language to talk about. And so Schopenhauer distinguishes the evils of death and pain from one another. Death is the fear of the termination of one's individual existence. um and so the individual you know it's in its nature to as the will to live it struggles with all its might against death but um But for Schopenhauer, he thinks we can dispel that kind of fear through reason by understanding the true substance of the world, you know, that which we are.

That true substance cannot die. Our individual existence is this an illusion that will dissolve one day, but that won't kill you in any real sense. So for Schopenhauer, the real evil between the two that he distinguishes is pain.

The real problem to deal with is not death, but the fact that life goes on endlessly, and life is endless pain. And so he concludes these considerations in section 54, laying this out clearly for us by way of example.

A man who had assimilated firmly into his way of thinking the truth so far advanced, but at the same time had not come to know through his own experience or through a deeper insight that constant suffering is essential to all life, who found satisfaction in life and took perfect light in it, who desired.

in spite of calm deliberation, that the course of his life as he had hitherto experienced it should be of endless duration or of constant recurrence, and whose courage to face life was so great that in return for life's pleasures he would willingly and gladly put up with all the hardships and miseries to which it is subject such a man would stand

with firm strong bones in the well-grounded enduring earth and would have nothing to fear armed with the knowledge we confer on him he would look with indifference at death hastening toward him on the wings of time

he would consider it as a false illusion an impotent specter frightening to the weak but having no power over him who knows that he himself is that will of which the whole world is the objectification or copy to which therefore life, and also the present, always remain certain and sure. So I know I said we're saving Nietzsche's interpretations and modifications of Schopenhauer for future episodes. But hearing that, I mean, that should ring some bells for you, right?

The idea of somebody wishing for constant recurrence of their life. The thought of death is, well, that's frightening to the weak, but not someone certain of their ever enduring life and existence and the fact that they are really the will.

um this to me almost reads like a challenge that nietzsche accepted schopenhauer is setting up this type of person um now For Schopenhauer's purposes, he's setting this up as the preliminary stage in an argument in which he goes on to argue that life is irredeemable by any pleasures that occur within it. Because the evil isn't death, it's pain. And Schopenhauer is only using this example of such a person just simply to say, to point out that it's their lack of understanding.

of the cruel pointless nature of life that would make them take such a position such a person as he describes them would be entirely correct about the nature of the world being solely will and this indestructible primal being death is of no consequence but to schopenhauer they would simply be wrong about life it is life and the will to live which must be rejected denied and negated

And so if we accept Schopenhauer's picture of the world, then Nietzsche's disagreement with him would not be about the facts on the ground, so to speak. It's that Nietzsche is willing to... say yes to that life that schopenhauer just outlined he's he's willing to posit that eternal recurrence as a positive thing and so he does not wish to negate the will and negate the world as schopenhauer does and we'll elaborate that on that in the following episodes

But Schopenhauer believes that such a viewpoint is not reasonable. And the strongest argument he has for that is the argument that... Simply put, pleasure is not happiness, or at least it's not sufficient for happiness. To Schopenhauer, happiness can only be meaningfully defined as the absence of what we would call suffering.

Not just physical pain, but suffering in the sense of mental anguish. Again, remember, only humans truly can suffer in the sense that we would understand suffering. And the absence of this suffering is happiness, as he defines it. Pleasure has nothing to do with it. In actual fact, pursuing pleasures is necessarily detrimental to happiness in Schopenhauer's view. That's central to what the problem is, right? And so he writes in 58,

And I'm quoting here in an abridged form, where I'll be skipping down through a couple sections. He writes, quote, all satisfaction or what is commonly called happiness is really and essentially always negative only and never positive for desire that is to say want is the precedent condition of every pleasure

And so the satisfaction or gratification can never be more than deliverance from a pain or a want. Such is not only every actual and evident suffering, but also every desire whose importunity disturbs our peace and indeed even the deadening boredom that makes existence a burden to us the want the privation

The suffering is what is positive and proclaims itself immediately, end quote. And what we have here is, it's fascinating to me because it's so platonic in a sense, while also being very anti-platonic. in another sense. It's a rejection of the concept of the good life, because life is, by definition, not good.

And yet Schopenhauer does have a sort of eudaimonia he's pointing to here. It's just that it's achieved by the negation of the individual will and the voluntary abandonment of the pursuits of life's aims. Because there's nothing to be gained if happiness is negative and merely the absence of suffering. And suffering is actually what it is that asserts itself.

asserts itself repeatedly through the movement of the endlessly striving will then the moral and reasonable thing to do in that case is to act negatively to deny oneself their endless chasing after their own desires um and So Schopenhauer's other prescriptions other than the contemplation of art and asceticism are quiet contemplation, living simply, and...

You know, following your desires as little as possible. And so walking out of Plato's cave involves this rejection of the world as a mere illusion. A life lived for knowledge and knowing as a thing detached from life and the will. And so what then is the aim of Schopenhauer's metaphysics and morality? Where does it all lead? Where does one's life lead if lived not for any goal or object of one's will? If one's only desire is to negate desire, to negate suffering, negate the will.

The will, of course, being the world. So what is left then? And Schopenhauer's answer is nothing. Schopenhauer's aim is the equivalent of the Buddhist concept of... prajnaparamita the perfection of wisdom which is it's the negation of the subject object dualism by definition the state of being is impossible for us to

fully encompassed in language as beings trapped within these individuated, willing existences, as we already said. But Schopenhauer even rejects the conceptual frameworks that he discovered in the in the east and that inspired him so much at the very end of the work he writes in section 71 quote that we abhor nothingness so much is simply another way of saying

that we will life so much and that we are nothing but this will and know nothing but it alone end quote when this denial of will is achieved in the tradition of the saints of every religion We step aside from this restless pressure and effort and stop partaking in the constant transition from desire to apprehension, from joy to sorrow. We contemplate the forms of the world, but do not invest them.

with substance, which is a process done by our desires. And so Schopenhauer continues, quote, we have to banish that dark impression of nothingness. which as the final goal hovers behind all virtue and holiness, and which we fear as children fear darkness. We must not even evade it, as the Indians do, by myths and meaningless words.

such as reabsorption in brahman or the nirvana of the buddhists on the contrary we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is for all who are still full of the will assuredly nothing but also conversely to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself this very real world of ours with all its sons and galaxies is nothing

end quote. Sometimes scholars in the West have translated nirvana as extinction, perhaps a more proper term as extinguishment. I've heard some figures such as Peacock and and bachelor criticize these translations and you know critique the fact that the west was introduced to eastern religion through the pessimism of schopenhauer but i think it's fair to say that schopenhauer here even you know he

He's distinguishing himself from his Eastern influences and that he's willing to be, you know, I wouldn't say more pessimistic, but he's saying we shouldn't even have a... linguistic term for this state of being because that just gives people the impression it's our way of hiding from the fact of looking at looking honestly at the fact that

the salvation is the void that's what he says like hovers behind all attempts of holiness and virtue is the promise of nothingness um and you know psychologically You could have a field day wondering about whether that's actually true or says more about Schopenhauer than everyone else. But, you know, no... likening of the state of one in nirvana to some kind of continued existence. No mystifying of the fact of the state of being that we're aiming towards. Full acceptance.

that rejection of the world means true nothingness so true death for schopenhauer isn't something achieved through suicide he calls suicide vain in a useless gesture because the will will continue incarnating and you'll still be part of that. true death is found in the conscious rational rejection of life as a sort of autonomous choice of the willing subject true nothingness is achieved as an act of the intellect an act of pure knowledge pure perception

And thus, even though he writes elsewhere that it would have been better if there were no existence at all, as with the quote that we started the episode with, his attitude is ultimately more nuanced than that. The world as he sees it, the way it actually is. um human life is the opportunity to find freedom um and that's as a consequence of humanity reaching this point of being able to represent the suffering of the world fully

And freedom from that world is synonymous with nothingness. And so there we have it. There is your introduction to Schopenhauer. So that next week, when we get into Nietzsche and his works drawing on Schopenhauer, you will already know about concepts such as will, representation, genius, the sublime.

the pure will a subject of knowledge the bright mirror of the artist's perception negation of the will happiness as a negative principle the redemptive power of nature and so on and so forth um which you know all those things i just belted off

before listening to this if you've never read schopenhauer that would have sounded like a bunch of nonsense but hopefully all those terms now fire neurons for you um and so from there we can begin to show how nietzsche took this picture of the world as well and was heavily influenced by it and how he was intrigued by this idea of feeling drive desire as the root of all life he was perplexed by schopenhauer's demonic conclusions about the nature of reality

And Nietzsche wrote about how his own romantic impulses spoke so differently to him. But, you know, it's my belief, personally, I think the ideas of Schopenhauer's which are but little discussed. probably had a greater impact on Nietzsche or kind of underrated. You know, things like Schopenhauer's view on art, his view of history as simply an endlessly repeating cycle that progresses nowhere.

Because to him, reality only exists in the present, and the true geniuses, quote-unquote, were in... you know motivated by genius as he sees it as a as this uh eternal remembering of uh you know direct perception of this eternal knowledge and so um that can happen anywhere anytime it's not a It's not a process of progress. And finally, this notion of the eternal indestructibility of being, which I think provided the groundwork for Nietzsche.

among many other influences that he had, to begin thinking about the eternal recurrence. All right, well, thank you everybody for taking a trip down to the underworld with me. We'll be back next week to talk about another essay from the Untimely Meditations, which is Schopenhauer as Educator. All right, signing off.

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