Schopenhauer Flashcards
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) - German 19th century philosopher.
Life is painful and it would have been better not to have been born, he said.
We are all caught up in a hopeless cycle of wanting things, getting them, and then wanting more things. It doesn’t stop until we die. We’re never satisfied, never stop craving more than we have.
His great work: The World as Will and Representation was first published in 1818. Reality has 2 aspects: Will and Representation.
Will is the blind driving force that is found in absolutely everything that exists. Representation is the world as we experience it. It is our construction of reality in our minds. It’s what Kant called the phenomenal world.
Like Kant, Schopenhauer believed there was a deeper reality that exists beyond your experiences too, behind the world of appearances. Kant called this the nominal word and thought we had no direct access to it.
Schopenhauer’s thought can best be read as a Western interpretation of, and response to, the enlightened pessimism found in Buddhist thought.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy also gives a name to a primary force within us: The Will-to-Life.
The Will-to-Life is a constant force which makes us thrust ourselves forward, cling to existence and look to our own advantage. It’s blind, dumb and very insistent. What the Will-to-Life makes us focus on most of all is sex.
Schopenhauer deeply resented the disruption caused to intelligent people by infatuations but he refused to conceive of these as either disproportionate or accidental.
In his eyes, love is connected to the most important (and miserable) underlying project of the Will-to-Life and hence of all our lives: having children.
The romantic dominates life because “what is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation.”
He argued that most of the time, if our intellect were properly in charge of choosing who to fall in love with, we would pick radically different people to the ones we end up with.
Watching the human spectacle, Schopenhauer felt deeply sorry for us. We are just like animals – except, because of our greater self-awareness, even more unhappy.
We are driven frantically to push ourselves forward, get good jobs to impress prospective partners, wonder endlessly about finding The One (imagining they’ll make us happy), and are eventually briefly seduced by someone long enough to produce a child, and then have to spend the next 40 years in misery to atone for our error.
Schopenhauer is beautifully and comically gloomy about human nature: “There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy”
He advises us to spend as long as we can with art and philosophy, whose task is to hold up a mirror to the frenzied efforts and unhappy turmoil created in all of us by the Will-to-Life.
We may not be able to quell the Will-to-Life very often, but in the evenings at the theater, or on a walk with a book of poetry, we can step back from the day to day and look at life without illusion.
The art Schopenhauer loved best is the opposite of sentimental: Greek tragedies, the aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld and the political theory of Machiavelli and Hobbes. Such works speak frankly about egoism, suffering, selfishness and the horrors of married life – and extend a tragic, dignified, melancholy sympathy to the human race.
It’s fitting that Schopenhauer’s own work fitted his own description of what philosophy and art should do perfectly. It too is deeply consoling in its morbid bitter pessimism.
For example, he tells us: To marry means to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other. Every life history is the history of suffering. Life has no intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion.
Schopenhauer was a shaping influence on one of the most important of all 20th century philosophers: Wittgenstein.
Schopenhauer looked on the ultimate reality as perfectly revolting. He was willing to speak of it on occasion even in moral terms, as wicked. He though the world was a horrific place, full of injustice, cruelty, disease and repression.
The world of nature is a world of perpetual screaming.
The temporary way out is through aesthetic contemplation. Experiences that make life bearable mostly come from art. Art provides a still point so that, for a short time, we can escape the endless cycle of striving and desire. Music is the best art form for this.
If you listen to a Beethoven symphony in the right frame of mind, you are glimpsing reality as it truly is.
For Schopenhauer, our normal attitude to everything was to see it in terms of its possible use, and that the aesthetic attitude was an exception to this. In our aesthetic responses we are, as it were, released from the rack of willing.
Nietzsche thought of Schopenhauer as a man who wasn’t content with a superficial view of things. He didn’t try to gloss over the dark aspects of the world and life. He said that Schopenhauer depicted human life and history as they are, not as one might them like to be.
Nietzsche also entirely agreed with Schopehauer’s subordination of the intellect to Will. He never ceased to admire him.
Freud was also influenced by Schopenhauer. 2 of the most important ideas, generally credited to Freud, has been spelled out by the former before the latter was born:
1/ The notion of the unconscious - most of our motivation is unconscious to ourselves. It is repressed because we do not want to confront it. It is incompatible with the view of ourselves that we want to maintain.
A great deal of motivated energy goes into either keeping it repressed or allowing it to surface only after it has been cleaned up and made falsely presentable to our conscious minds. This argument is the core of Freudianism.
2/ Omnipresence of sexual motivation - this comes into almost everything. The reason relates to the fact that it is sexual motivation that brings human beings into existence. Sexual activity is far and away the most important activity most of us ever engage in.
Asceticism (A - ss - et) - severe self-discipline and avoiding of all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons.
There is a more extreme method for coming to terms with the cycle of desire. To avoid getting caught up in all this, simply turn away from the world altogether and become an ascetic: live a life of sexual chastity and poverty.
