“The world is my idea:”
this is a truth which holds good for
everything that lives and knows,
though man alone can bring it into
reflective and abstract consciousness.”
This is how Arthur Schopenhauer
introduces us to his
most celebrated work,
“The World as Will
and Representation.”
Such a potent way to introduce
your audience to your inner world
requires quite some audacity.
And Schopenhauer showcased
a considerate amount
of that throughout his life.
He was the philosopher that
preceded Nietzsche
and succeeded Kant.
These three philosophy
moguls created a continuum
of critical thinking and
life-defining concepts
that influenced the
western thought like few.
Schopenhauer was a
man of great depth
who tried to understand the
maladies of the human condition
and propose pragmatic
ways to deal with it.
Through his writings,
I discovered notions
that not only re-engineer the
ways we think about ourselves
and our relationship
with reality,
but also transcend the way we
view the very fabric of reality.
Schopenhauer’s work was dense
and his language assertive.
He was a pessimist but
also a pragmatist.
He detested puerile arguments and
wanted to get the gist of things.
Most of his postulates
emerged from a strong desire
to live a life that was within
his scope of understanding,
but also face the
truth about reality,
notwithstanding how
harsh this may be.
He was a great admirer
of Kantian philosophy
and more specifically his ideas
about the thing-in-itself
and transcendental idealism.
The thing-in-itself is
quite self-explanatory.
The thing-in-itself is the object as it
is, regardless of how we perceive it.
With regards to
transcendental idealism,
Schopenhauer described it as a
“distinction between the phenomenon
and the thing in itself.”
In essence, what Kant
supports is that
the human experience is totally
subjective and disengaged
from the nature of the
phenomena we perceive.
For instance, we can observe
and interact with a dog,
but we can’t really
have a dog experience
as a dog actually perceives it.
Extrapolating from
these two concepts,
he attempts to evolve the concept
of perception and reality
by adding the notion of
will in the equation.
The will, as Schopenhauer
understands it,
is the expression of the desire of all
nature to pursue and propagate life.
Without will there can be no life
but it is also through will
that most of mankind’s misery
and suffering is manifested.
We, as humans, are
consumed by our drives.
Drives such as sexual
desires, pursuit of pleasure,
need for interaction, will to power,
the elucidation of
aesthetics and much more.
They are all integral constituents
of the way we operate
and they all fall
under the umbrella
of what Schopenhauer refers
to as the will to live.
Life isn’t just an
abstract concept for us.
It is an experience manifested
through a plethora of wills
that are intertwined in an
attempt to form an ensemble
that justifies the reasoning
behind our existence.
But this conglomerate
of individual wills
isn’t limited solely to
the human dimension.
It can be found in the whole of
nature in ways we cannot comprehend
due to our limited perception
this is what Schopenhauer
calls the Will (capital W).
And this limited perception,
according to Schopenhauer,
is the source of our
misery and suffering.
The supreme principle of the
universe is apprehensible
only through introspection and
through the transcendence of egoism
that each human is endowed with.
Ego is the enemy,
an enemy that can be confronted
only through self-awareness,
empathy, and compassion.
The curse that has befallen
our species is that
we cannot really free
ourselves from the Will.
The Will can be released or
negated, but it can’t change.
Within this inauspicious landscape,
we ought to attempt to operate in
the most effective way possible.
It sounds like an
arduous challenge,
it feels like groping and
fumbling in the dark,
but Schopenhauer adumbrates that
the denial of the will to live
might be the only way to
salvation from suffering.
This pessimistic outlook towards life
is observed all over his narrative,
and it was because of this
tone that many refer to him
as the Philosopher of Pessimism.
The absurdity of reality has always
been the main area of interest
for most western philosophers.
Schopenhauer, in his attempt to
create meaning out of this absurdity,
illuminated a very
pessimistic rhetoric.
Take for example the
following passage from
“The World as Will and Representation”:
“And to this world, to this scene
of tormented and agonised beings,
who only continue to exist
by devouring each other,
in which, therefore,
every ravenous beast is the living
grave of thousands of others,
and its self-maintenance is
a chain of painful deaths;
and in which the capacity for feeling
pain increases with knowledge,
and therefore reaches its
highest degree in man,
a degree which is the higher the
more intelligent the man is;
to this world it has been sought
to apply the system of optimism,
and demonstrate to us that
it is the best of all possible worlds.
The absurdity is glaring.”
It is self-evident that his
inner world is tormented
due to the absurdity that is
prevalent all over our existence.
This nihilistic
approach connotes
an alignment with the
idea of determinism
due to our inability
to influence the Will.
However, he doesn’t give up.
He understands that
there is an escape,
even if this can be found
on a metaphysical level.
“Not merely that the world exists,
but still more that it is such a
miserable and melancholy world,
is the tormenting problem
of metaphysics.”
Here, he is tapping into
the world of metaphysics
by realizing that there needs to be
another dimension to our existence.
One we will never experience
if we keep recycling
the same thinking
modus ad infinitum.
“The life of every individual,
viewed as a whole and in general,
and when only its most significant
features are emphasized,
is really a tragedy;
but gone through in detail it
has the character of a comedy.”
Sarcasm is also a weapon
he uses from time to time
in order to alleviate
the significance
of the tragedy of the
human condition.
Through self-awareness,
we come to understand
that our creator has either
a very sadistic taste
or that he, she, it or
they are testing us.
When we realize how
tragic that is,
we end up thinking that it could
all be a travesty of some sort.
Having to deal with this level of
absurdity makes you either angry
or you laugh at it.
“For if anything in the
world is desirable,
so desirable that even the
dull and uneducated herd
in its more reflective moments would
value it more than silver and gold,
it is that a ray of light should fall
on the obscurity of our existence,
and that we should
obtain some information
about this enigmatical life of ours,
in which nothing is clear
except its misery and vanity.”
Eventually, he ends up adopting
a more pragmatic stance.
Lamenting can only get one so far
and, after we get over our anger,
we need to face the
truth and deal with it.
Schopenhauer emphasizes
that in the face of a world
filled with endless strife,
our only escape is a
universal moral awareness
that will allow us to achieve a
more balanced frame of mind.
By merging Christian
precepts and Indian wisdom,
he attempts to lay out some major
principles of moral awareness
that can lead humanity to
a more tranquil state.
Principles such as the repudiation
of violence altogether,
the idea that one should treat
others as one treats oneself,
the transcendence of egoism, the fight
against suffering in the world,
and the perennial
cultivation of compassion
as an absolute
humanitarian doctrine.
After tasting the truth of human
nature from a moral standpoint,
Schopenhauer realizes that
there are only two paths
that can help one deal
with this conundrum –
Aesthetics, and Asceticism.
Aesthetics is presented as the
antidote to the ugliness of suffering.
It is through aesthetic
perception that
the transcendence of ego
can manifest itself,
for with aesthetics
we can evaluate
an idea beyond our earthly
interpretation of reality.
This idea is analogous to
the idea of sublimation
that Freud put forth
during his time.
Orienting consciousness
towards states of mind
that are less individuated
and more cosmic
has always inspired
great thinkers,
hence the strong affinity
towards eastern philosophies.
“Only through the pure
contemplation . . .
which becomes absorbed
entirely in the object,
are the Ideas comprehended;
and the nature of genius
consists precisely
in the pre-eminent ability for
such contemplation. . . .
This demands a complete
forgetting of our own person.”
We can temporarily
emancipate ourselves
from what the Will dictates
through an aesthetic experience.
“On the occurrence of an
aesthetic appreciation,
the will thereby vanishes
entirely from consciousness.”
Asceticism, on the other hand,
arises as the more secure attitude,
since, according to Schopenhauer,
aesthetic perception, due
to its transient nature,
is most of the time short-lived.
Asceticism can result in the
denial towards our will-to-live,
thus allowing us to fight
against the suffering
that the Will attempts
to impose upon us.
“By the expression asceticism, which
I have already used so often,
I understand in the narrower sense
this deliberate breaking of the
will by refusing the agreeable
and looking for the disagreeable,
the voluntarily chosen
way of life of penance
and self-chastisement for the
constant mortification of the will.”
The issue, usually highlighted as a
contradiction in this way of thinking,
is that the suffering that
asceticism tries to assuage,
paradoxically leads to different
types of suffering like isolation,
anxiety, antisocial behavior,
sexual oppression and so on.
Regardless of how asceticism
is portrayed or exercised,
Schopenhauer truly believes
that the ascetic struggle
is the ultimate struggle
against the Will
and this act in itself
can give us a modicum
of what self-transcendence
might actually entail.
Many prominent philosophical figures
criticized Schopenhauer’s work
and claimed that there are numerous
contradictions in his philosophy.
This is inevitable
when one possesses
such a genius in the art
of abstract reasoning.
The world in and of itself
is full of contradictions
and we should all just embrace
the absurdity of that fact.
Schopenhauer, with his works,
has rightfully earned a place
in the pantheon of philosophers
across space and time.
In my first introduction to
him, he made me a pessimist.
But then he helped
me enjoy life.
His words can be mesmerizing
and can alleviate the pain
of existence for most of us
insofar as we open our hearts
and our minds to them.
Hi everyone,
I won’t lie to you.
I was ignoring Schopenhauer
for many years
because I was a hardcore
Nietzsche devotee
and that rendered me somewhat
snobbish towards other philosophers.
That was such a naïve assertion
since it alienated me
from one of the most important
thinkers in human history.
Schopenhauer for me epitomizes
the essence of the
quintessential philosopher
and this becomes more
vivid every time I read
“The world as will
and representation.”
As a huge thank you for making
it to the end of this video
and for supporting my work,
I want to offer you the chance
to experience the same feeling.
I will send a copy of the
“The world as will and representation,”
Schopenhauer’s most celebrated
work, to one of you.
All you need to do,
is to follow me on Instagram,
subscribe to this channel,
get notifications and
message me on Instagram,
confirming that you did all
that with a screenshot.
I will randomly pick the
winner in a week from now
and I will contact you in your
Instagram account, so stay tuned.
Again, thanks for watching.
See you in the next video.
