【中英】叔本华：《作为意志与表象的世界》与虚无主义--Dr·Michael Sugrue

• Arthur Schopenhauer is a unique and influential 19th-century German philosopher.
• His work is often uncomfortable and contrary to the optimism of his contemporaries.
• Schopenhauer's family background profoundly shapes his philosophy and outlook on life.
• He critiques previous philosophers, especially Kant and Hegel, and presents a pessimistic worldview.
• The concepts of will and desire play a significant role in his understanding of human existence.

Arthur Schopenhauer is one of the most unique and influential of 19th-century German philosophers. And this is remarkable because in and of itself his work is, if not repellent, at least rather unpleasant. He is remarkable for holding views which are designed to make people uncomfortable, to drive them out of their complacency.

While he may be successful in driving us out of our complacency, there's a sort of bitterness and acerbic quality to his writing which is not like other 19th-century optimistic, romantic writers. So when you open Schopenhauer for the first time, be prepared for something of a shock. He does not write like a typical German philosopher. He has a very sprightly style which contrasts very powerfully with the rather dour and unpleasant and pessimistic content.

I would compare him to Nietzsche, if you're looking for a comparable poet-philosopher in the German language. And I am inclined to think that although he's not generally read as a choice in the canon right now, he is worth reading because he is so influential on people like Freud or Wittgenstein or Nietzsche later on in the 19th century and the early 20th century.

Now, with most philosophers, I'm inclined to shy away from family background. I think, for example, when you study Kant, it's pretty much not important to know what his personal life was like. It doesn't tell you very much about the Kantian ding an sich. It doesn't tell you very much about his philosophy. That is not the case with Arthur Schopenhauer.

Arthur Schopenhauer's family background has a lot to do with his psychic makeup and the stance he takes towards the world, the sort of characteristic postures of his philosophy. In the first case, his father committed suicide. This is the kind of thing that generally will have an extremely negative effect on the psychiatric kind of permanent damage, or at least long-term lasting damage, a very negative view towards the world.

It seems to me this carries over into Schopenhauer's work. I mean, it's unmistakable. The second important fact, in addition to his father's suicide, is the fact that his mother, who survived the father, was extremely cold and distant and eventually threw him out of the house, breaking with him.

In other words, he is at sea in the social world. He has no familial contacts. He is almost perfectly lonely. And in addition to being almost perfectly lonely, it is hard to imagine a man that wallows in his unhappiness to a greater extent than Schopenhauer. He has performed the unusual service of offering to share his unhappiness with us.

This willingness to share is perhaps Schopenhauer's sole gentle gesture towards the rest of humanity. If you keep in mind his background and the persistent and continuing negativity of his personal life, I think it will inform your reading of his philosophical works. This is one of those cases where it is not possible to separate the man and the philosophy. I am not sure if this should be called a philosophy. I don't quite know what to call it.

So for the purposes of discussion, let's consider it the metaphysics from hell. Now, what are we talking about? What is Schopenhauer involved with? Well, his background is quite intriguing. He's a consistent reader; he reads a great many kinds of texts, and his most important influences in terms of his philosophical reading are the great idealists, particularly Plato and Kant.

Kant, in particular, is very important for Schopenhauer. There are elements in his philosophy which are borrowed directly from Kant where he says, rather than reinvent the wheel, I will accept the Kantian view here and then move on and invert the Kantian with regard to other matters. So the legacy of Kant is the most important for Schopenhauer, as it is for all early 19th-century German philosophers.

In addition to Kant, what's unique about Schopenhauer is that he is one of the first European intellectuals to begin reading in Indian religion. Here I'm talking about subcontinental India, and in particular Schopenhauer spent a good deal of time reading the Upanishads, and although I hadn't noticed direct references to it, I believe that he'd been reading some of the works of the Buddha.

There is a certain sort of emphasis on Indian mysticism, but in addition a sort of negative evaluation of the human world, creating desire as a problem to be solved, establishing the personality as a challenge to be overcome, rather than merely a boundary to human experience. So Schopenhauer has a powerful strain of Indian Eastern pessimism that I think is a combination of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Connected with that, we have a weird combination to the tradition of German idealism. He's saturated in Kant and while he was at university, he heard the lectures of Fichte and Schleiermacher. So he is very much part of the tradition of German idealism. The difficulty lies in the fact that he's going to take that idealist tradition and to a great extent stand it on its head.

Schopenhauer in some respects is a one trick pony. The one trick that he knows he does all the time and he's real good at it. He takes a philosopher and perhaps borrows some elements of it, keeps them the same, and thereafter he stands the philosophy on its head.

So what Schopenhauer knows how to do is invert prior philosophies in unique and rather disturbing ways, in ways you wouldn't have thought a sane man could think. The results are quite surprising and sometimes intriguing, if perhaps off-putting at the same time.

A couple of observations: First off, in his essays, which are in some ways the most accessible part of his work, they are hard to read nowadays, particularly in late 20th-century America. The persistent misogyny, the racism, the repulsive characteristics of this he makes no bones about. Schopenhauer is, in that respect, an anachronism.

I would like to send you, if you were going to read this, I would like to send you to some text. I am not sure that there is any text that would not be offensive, and justifiably so. But if you want to have access to Schopenhauer, I would say start with the essays. His great work, and there's only one great work that Schopenhauer produced, is rather intimidating. If you find you like the essays, then perhaps you'd want to go on.

But I wouldn't start with Schopenhauer's main work, which is called "The World as Will and Idea," another ponderous German title for a great big book that takes the tradition of German idealism and inverts some of the main ideas. In particular, Schopenhauer has a definite animus towards Hegel. They are roughly contemporaries.

While Schopenhauer and Hegel were both at the University of Berlin, Hegel, of course, was at the apogee of his career, one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the Western world. And Schopenhauer was Schopenhauer, which means that he was not going to get a wide following. Schopenhauer was arrogant and anti-Hegelian to the point of a sort of mania, decided to schedule his lectures.

He could schedule them at any time he wished. He scheduled them directly against the Hegel, the lectures of Hegel. And Hegel, of course, got hundreds of students to sign up for his lectures, and Schopenhauer got a few the first day and thereafter got none. As a result, he left the university because, as most intellectuals think, no one understood him.

People did not realize that he was far and away Hegel's superior, and that just shows how benighted and wicked they are. Keep that in mind. Many frustrated intellectuals feel this way. It is remarkable how bitter and acerbic he can be. If you look at some of the essays, there's a wonderful line, and I mean, it's stuck in my brain since I read it in college.

He said, "I wish to apologize to the reader of the future for mentioning Hegel, a philosopher you have never heard of," which is an incredibly harsh thing to say, but it tells you all you need to know about Schopenhauer. It gives you the attitude and in some respects the style is much more important than the substance here.

Alas, we have heard of Hegel and that tells you even more about Schopenhauer. Now his great work is called "The World is Will and Idea," published as a young man in 1818. It's a remarkable piece of work because it is such a musical construction. He is a highly aesthetic man. One of the perhaps disturbing or discordant things about the history of philosophy is that it is often the case that people with wonderfully artistic styles who have great literary creativity are often neither edifying nor moral.

In other words, it is possible to be a very bad man or to say some really unpleasant or offensive things, but to say them in a very elegant way. I direct you to Nietzsche. It is certainly possible. So what we should notice here is that he's got a wonderful style and he's a German philosopher, which is amazing because how many German philosophers have wonderful styles?

At the same time, the content of what he is saying is often quite unpleasant, often quite off-putting. The four parts of "The World as Will and Idea" were described by Thomas Mann as a symphony in four movements. That is a beautiful and very acute way of describing it. It is sort of verbal music, has a high poetic content and is certainly very pleasant if you don't stop to think about what he's telling you.

The idea of the world and will, or the concept behind "The World as Will and Idea," is basically this: He is making the distinction, characteristic of German philosophy, between subject and object, which also corresponds to the distinction between noumena and phenomena. He's obviously borrowing from Kant here, and he's going to take parts of that and then invert other parts to come up with a new metaphysics of his own.

What he's trying to do is create, first of all, formulate the problem of the self. What is it like to be a self-conscious entity in this world? After formulating this problem, he's going to show us that it has the deepest spiritual implications. So he's going to formulate a powerful spiritual problem, something analogous to that of Kierkegaard.

Then he's going to tell us, unlike Kierkegaard, that this problem has no solution and that this is the human condition. So, like Hamlet, Schopenhauer is trapped in an egoistic prison called the world. What he's going to do is share with us news of what this prison is like because he seems to have discerned its perimeter.

Like Kierkegaard, you could say that this is a relentless sort of negativity. Unlike Kierkegaard, this is a sort of sinfulness without redemption, which is perhaps the worst of all human conditions.

The first part is the world as representation. The German word for it is Vorstellung. What that means is the world as idea. In order to explain this to you, I'm going to have to drop back a little bit, talk about the philosophy of mind.

In looking over the human Kant lectures, I found that we just didn't have time to cover the philosophy of mind, which is so important and pregnant with implications for later philosophical developments. You can't understand what Schopenhauer is doing unless you understand the Kantian philosophy of mind. You can't understand that unless I tell you a little bit about Hume.

Let's start from the beginning, then. For Hume and the British empiricists, the mind is what they call a tabula rasa means a blank slate. Another way of thinking about it would be that the mind is an empty box. A baby gets born and starts to see and hear and touch and taste, and sensations come into that empty box.

Then the mind, in its activity of making these sensations coherent, bundles them together. So if I were to look at this podium, for example, I would see that it's hard, that it has a certain degree of weight, that it's smooth, that it's brown. What I do is I bundle these sensations together to form a thing called the podium. Makes a certain amount of sense.

Now, the problem that Hume ran into is that although we see tables and chairs and people and floors and ceilings, we never see certain things which we think are important parts of the world. For example, Hume will tell us that you never see time, you never see space, you never see causality, and obviously that's true.

If I were to drop this pen, take a pen and drop it, we see the causal relation, we see me pick the pen up, let it go, and it falls. If I do that 100 times, we'll see it fall every time. Hume's point will be, though, although we see the event of me holding the pen up and pen falling, we never see causality. All we see is a regularity between the two.

Similarly, if you look around for time, you're going to look a long time. You may look at clocks, you may look at calendars, but all you're going to see are pieces of paper and mechanisms. You're not going to see time.

So what Hume decides is that it's not there. It's a sort of imaginary thing, the way we glue the universe together. Kant rejects this kind of skepticism. In other words, we have a problem here. We don't know how it is.

We found out about space and time and causality and being and negation and number and all the things which empiricism really lacks a good coherent account for. Kant takes up that challenge. What Kant does is says, "No, David Hume, you are wrong. In fact, the human mind is not a blank slate. It is not a tabula rasa."

In fact, the human mind doesn't passively absorb sensation. Rather, it actively constructs the external world. When you miss that activity of the human mind in constructing the external world, you cause yourself all kinds of philosophical paradoxes. It's a brilliant answer.

See if I can explain it for Kant. Think of the human mind as being a room, like this room, and say that the room has one window and only one window, and all your doors are locked. You're never going to get outside this room. That's the human mind itself.

Now, when you look at the external world, when you observe and experience external reality, it looks to you like external reality is shaped exactly like the window. Of course it is! That's your only access to it. Literally speaking, the shape of the window, as far as you're concerned, is the shape of what's outside the window.

In other words, the light that comes in is precisely shaped by the opening that lets it in. There's a form that the mind imposes on external experience. This activity of imposing these forms is a far better, more accurate, truer representation of human cognition.

Instead of being a blank slate or an empty box, it's actually actively constructing the external world. Let me give you an example from the podium. I experience the podium, for example, as being both spatial and temporal. It exists in time, right? It was here when I started the lecture, and it'll be here when I finish, with any luck.

And it takes up a certain space. If I walk into that space, I'm going to hit the podium. Now, what Kant says is that the mind contains, I believe it's 12 a priori forms of human cognition. A priori means that it's prior to our experience of the world. In other words, it's built into experiencing the world as a human subject.

These a priori forms necessarily shape the way we experience the external world. Kant says that the external world is composed of Dingen an sich. What that means is things in themselves. Surely, there are podiums, there are cups of coffee, there are pieces of paper, there are people and there are objects in the world.

But we can never experience these objects in an unmediated way, the way Hume assumes. Actually, we actively construct these objects by imposing on them categories we can't space, time, causality, number being negation.

This is built right into experiencing the world as a subject. This is all. Thousands of pages of philosophy are encapsulated in a line from T.S. Eliot in the Four Quartets, where he says he's in the rose garden. He says, "The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at."

Isn't that beautiful? That just gets it all together. Well, the podium has the look of a podium that is looked at. It's not like this in and of itself. We can't find out what the podium is in and of itself. We have to experience the world through space, time, causality, through these necessary forms.

That's why we all know what space is, but nobody can explain it to you. If somebody really said they didn't know what quantity was, what would we do? We all know what quantity is; we just can't explain it. It's built right into the hardwiring of the human psyche. It's a deep answer, a very important answer. This is what Schopenhauer takes as his foundation.

In other words, the first movement of the world as idea—the world as Vorstellung, the world as representation—involves his saying that the external world is what Kant says it is: one big idea. So we have all these overlapping forms, and our whole experience of the world is. In the first part of this, he's being a good Kantian, and he is saying that the whole phenomenal world is one big Vorstellung.

The subject constructs the object. It's an activity of the mind. Now, what Kant says in addition to this, or it's correlative of this, is that we can't know the ding an sich. Ding an sich means the thing in itself. I can't experience the podium as it really is, I guess, in the mind of God, independent of space and time and causality and number; I have to look through the window.

I have no choice. My only access to it means that we never experience the external world as it is. We experience the external world as a human being has to experience things. So far, so good. What that means is that we can never know these things in and of themselves. We never get direct access to noumena.

We only have the phenomenal world which we construct through the a priori forms. Now, in the second movement of Schopenhauer's work, he says, "No, Kant is wrong." He is going to invert Kant and says, "Yes, there is one example of direct apprehension of a noumenal ding an sich."

The one thing that I can know about in this particular way, in this noumenal way, is the will. My own self-consciousness, in other words, my own consciousness of myself as a self, is not mediated by the a priori forms. I have direct, immediate apprehension of that fact. This is noumenal. This is not phenomenal. This is the thing in itself.

So what he's saying then is that the outside world is just like Kant said it was, mediated by the a priori forms. The internal world, alas, is not the way Kant thought it was. It's one unitary thing: will. And we get direct, immediate apprehension of that.

This introduction of the idea of will into German philosophy, or an emphasis on will, is going to have pregnant consequences for the late 19th and early 20th century. If you think of people like Nietzsche, right, this easily gets transformed into the will to power.

So what we're going to see here is that my knowledge of the internal world is of my own will. What this means is that human beings, like Hobbes said, are desiring animals. We desire this; we desire that. But Schopenhauer will change that slightly and say, "Yes, we are desiring animals, but we do not know ourselves." We do not really know our own wills.

Consciousness is only a subset of will. Reason is only a subset of will. In fact, will is a force that reason neither controls nor understands. We are subject to a terrifying force bigger than we are, mysterious to us that we are unable to control.

This will be a great prelude to Freud. If you think about the idea of the unconscious as being a part of our will, a part of our cogito that we are unaware of, this begins to make a certain degree of sense. So we lose that enlightenment optimism, the idea that we are in control.

We are reasonable animals in control of our wills. In fact, the will is controlling us. The will is a mysterious force that we find not just in individual people, but in all of nature and in all of human beings as a whole. So it's one big unitary thing. And we can get knowledge of this noumenal ding an sich directly.

Will is a blind ateliological force which animates all of nature. It would be worth comparing this to Spinoza's idea of conatus, the desire of all things to continue being what they are. It's a sort of inversion of that. All things would like to be something else, but they really don't have any control over what they are.

So they kind of muddle along as best they can. It's an extremely sort of pessimistic view of the human psyche. We are playthings in the hands of not even God, but something less than God because it doesn't have a will and doesn't like us. It just is what it is. It's a sort of terrifying view of human beings as being kind of froth on the ocean of reality.

Now, this is a problem because in some ways it's anti-Socratic. It means essentially that you can't know yourself, or that if you can know yourself, it's only after the fact. In other words, you find out what you really willed when you find out what you really did.

This would again hook up with Freud. Why did I forget that person's name? Because you really didn't like them and you really didn't want to talk to them. Well, I mean, this is foreshadowed in Schopenhauer's work.

You come back later on and say, "I wish I'd remembered that person's name." Then you realize to yourself you didn't will to. That's why you didn't. So there's a theory of parapraxis here that Freud is going to take up.

So what do we get? We get the world as outside and the world as inside. The world outside is the world as idea. The world inside is the world as will. And this faces us with a problem. What the hell are we? And how are we to deal with all these difficulties that the world confronts us with?

Because we are desiring animals, and desire is a purely negative condition. Here comes the Buddhism, here comes the Hinduism, here comes that kind of pessimistic Eastern philosophy. Desire is a problem, and the only sensible thing to do is to try and get away from desire and the human life.

Human life is one of privation. We'd be better off not existing at all. But because we do, we must lurch from one desire to another, never really being in control of them. Even the satisfaction of our desires is purely negative.

In other words, satisfying your desire for food, for sex, for love, or for anything, is like scratching an itch. It's nice when you scratch it, but you're better off not feeling itchy. You're better off not feeling anything. You're better off not existing at all.

But alas, you do exist. And so what are we supposed to do with this mess of a world? You can see the connection between this and Buddha's Eight Noble Truths. Suffering, death, disease—this is what the human condition is. We long for nirvana. We long for the abolition of the self.

We long essentially for death. This is cheery. No, I mean, do you see why this is described as a pessimism? It would be hard to think of anything more relentlessly negative than Schopenhauer. So we have the dubious possibility of self-knowledge. We have the problem of the self.

It is a spiritual problem, and alas, it has no spiritual solution, which is truly pathetic. The last two movements of this great philosophical symphony, this kind of exercise in negativity, are an attempt to solve the problem of the world as idea, in movement three, and then movement four.

It's an attempt to solve the problem of the world as well. Let's look at the third section, the solution to the problem of noumena, the solution to the problem of the world as idea. How can we escape from this prison of subjectivity that we are locked into by the Kantian category?

How will we be something other than purely contingent, purely subjective beings aching for release from this veil of Maya, this continuous parade of desires that we neither need nor gratify? Well, there are two ways out, according to Schopenhauer, and I think this is the greatest contribution of his book, to be honest.

In other words, this has certainly been the most influential part. First, the way out is through aesthetics. Art offers us a sort of redemption, as Schopenhauer said. Artistic, aesthetic satisfaction, aesthetic apprehension is the purest kind of objectivity, and there's a certain plausibility to that.

In other words, I'm not convinced that that's wrong. That may be the case, and it certainly has been very influential in the history of aesthetics. Often when philosophers give up on the idea of theology, when they give up on the idea of moral order to the world, the second-best or next-best alternative is to look for some sort of ersatz transcendence in the realm of art.

That essentially is what Schopenhauer does. He says, for the aesthetic man, when you appreciate something aesthetically, you can only do so in a moment of heightened objectivity. This is as objective as people ever get. There’s a certain sense to that I can believe that.

In addition, not only is aesthetic apprehension the closest humans come to objectivity, but the construction of art, the artistic genius, or artistic genius as a whole, is nothing but objectivity. So you know a great artist by the works that are produced, and you see in these great works of art, when you aesthetically apprehend them, that this artist did see the world as it really is.

He has been very influential in aesthetics. I think that most moral or political philosophers are not impressed by Schopenhauer, but I think in the theory of art this has often been worthwhile. When the book gets excerpted, insofar as it ever does, this is the part that usually comes out.

In addition to the idea or connected with this idea of aesthetics, we get certain ideas about Schopenhauer's view of art, which are particularly terrifying, bizarre, and perverse. First off, he has some very fine thoughts about art itself. Art is the highest cognitive activity.

Obviously, this is an inversion of Plato. He spent a great deal of time reading him. Where is art on the divided line, Plato at the very bottom? He stands it on its head and says, "No, the highest cognitive activity is art." Why? Because it's the only avenue to objectivity.

Makes a certain degree of sense. But then when you get to brass tacks, when he starts to talk about his specific views on art, I don't know if you feel this way, but I come away shaking my head. Think about his views on tragedy, and look at this as an inversion of Aristotle's Poetics.

Aristotle said that a real good tragedy would get a bigger-than-life man, an excellent, heroic sort of a guy with one fatal flaw, and then he meets catastrophe on account of this flaw. We get cathartic relief, and the hero has hubris, and all the stuff we get in the Poetics.

Schopenhauer says, "No, that's not my idea of tragedy." Schopenhauer's idea of a real good tragedy should be an average kind of a guy who has something really terrible happen to him due to no real fault of his own. This is allegedly edifying; in fact, it is terrifying.

The idea that well-average people meet terrible catastrophes for no real reason, and that this is the highest objectivity. Apparently, this is the way the world really is. Go back to the Buddha; have a look at the Eight Noble Truths.

This is his. In other words, it's a sort of anti-tragedy, right, where we get average-sized people just meeting the everyday catastrophes, no big deal. It means that suffering is accessible to us all. As a matter of fact, we can't avoid it, much less do anything about it.

So the best we can do is have art that tells us what the world really is: meaningless, chaotic suffering. May I suggest that there is a reason why Kafka liked Schopenhauer so much? This is an anticipation of the novels of Franz Kafka. One day Gregor Samsa wakes up and finds out that he's a bug. Gregor Samsa is not an especially interesting guy, and he suffers for no reason that anybody understands.

Yeah, yeah, this is really influential. I think it's its greatest justification for why we would want to include something like this in the great books. Because it's pregnant with so much of later German culture.

In addition to aesthetics or in addition to tragedy, he also talks about music. His views on music were very popular among late 19th-century composers, particularly Wagner, who really liked his music—or his views on music.

Of course, Schopenhauer disdained Wagner completely. Well, anyone that would admire him, you can imagine that Schopenhauer would disdain. But think about the kind of psyche where you can't argue with a sick mind. This guy has some sort of a problem.

There is no conflict between being crazy and being really gifted. He's one of the best examples of that. He says that music is the direct apprehension and the direct statement. It's a copy of the will itself.

That is why we don't need to translate music from one language to another. It is complete non-symbolic, non-conventional communication. It talks from one will to the other directly. You get a direct understanding of that.

Of course, that's the highest kind of objectivity. You can see why Wagner would gravitate towards it, and you can see why Schopenhauer would disdain Wagner. It meshes together very nicely.

The other way out of this problem of the external world, this problem of subjectivity, the problem of the world as idea—besides aesthetics—is ethics. This is a very odd thing. I wouldn't have expected this guy to be writing about ethics. Aesthetics, one would imagine, would be enough.

But no, he says that aesthetics also offer us a way out of this prison of subjectivity. The way we do that is by breaking down the illusory bounds of the ego. The saint in both the Buddhist and Christian tradition is one whose loving-kindness overflows the boundaries of the self so that he recognizes in another's pain, another's suffering, his own suffering.

The point being that universal compassion is the foundation of both Buddhist and Christian ethics. The saint, as well as the artist, are the only two people that can get outside the prison. Subjectivity, we have an aesthetic objectivity which we get, which was communicated through art.

We have an ethical objectivity which is communicated through charitable actions which show that you have gotten beyond the illusory bounds of the self. This escape from the self is what this philosophy is all about. If you were Arthur Schopenhauer, you would want to escape from yourself too.

Think about it. I mean, you want to live with this. Alright, now, the final chapter is perhaps the most intriguing of all and in some ways the most depressing of all. Here we're going to get beyond will, beyond our understanding of our noumenal selves.

It gets blacker and blacker as we go in. You call this tough love? I mean, I guess he's trying to do us some benefit, but maybe not. It's hard to tell with Schopenhauer. He thinks that nihilism can be really edifying.

I would be tempted to say nihilism can be fun, but it doesn't quite capture the idea. It's good for you to realize how bad things are, or in a world that is terrible, it's good to know the worst, or at least here's the worst, and I hope it's good for you. Take it and do something with it.

What we get here is the solution to the problem of the internal man, of the will. Two ways around it, asceticism and mysticism. The idea here is that we are a bundle of desires, and we move from one desire to another. The only way to get beyond desire is the truth.

Traditional paths of both Christian and Buddhist mystics and saints involve the denial of the flesh, fasting, self-flagellation, living as a hermit or an anchorite—all these are denials of the will. When you face the will down and chase the will away and achieve this kind of Buddhistic indifference, the indifference of the Christian saint who has removed himself from society and who constantly denies his will, this gives you some access to if not a blessed condition of life.

The best possible Human life, which is a relentlessly grim thought, is that asceticism is a way out. Think of the Buddha's Eight Noble Truths, right? Death, suffering, old age are inevitable to us. The best thing for us is not to be born, but who's so lucky as that?

If you have to be born, well, face your will down, control your will, and exert a will to power over yourself. This will hark back to Nietzsche once again. That's the best thing a human being can do.

In addition to that, mysticism is another way out because what that does is collapse rational thought altogether; it collapses the distinction between the will and idea. Mysticism and asceticism have in common the fact that they both long for the abolition of the self.

This is worship of your own extinction. It's embracing your own finitude because the particular time, space, and experience contained within your finitude are relentlessly awful. It's a pursuance of your own extinction.

You can see how this folds back a great many themes from the Upanishads or from Hindu and Buddhist thinking. The difference, of course, being in the case of the Hindus that you're not coming back. Suicide is no way out, whereas this longing for death, longing for extinction, I think is a sort of philosophical suicide, or a sort of an ode to death, something like that.

Now, the conclusions that Schopenhauer draws here about the human condition are two. First of all, and this is inverted, bizarre, and negative, he says that Leibniz was wrong. Leibniz said that this is the best of all possible worlds. In fact, Schopenhauer points out that this is the worst of all possible worlds.

It's not that Leibniz's claim is dubious the way Voltaire says, but he just says, "Look, this is clearly the worst of all possible worlds.” If it was any worse, it wouldn't exist at all. It's just good enough so that it has some existence.

But if this world got any worse, it just wouldn't exist. The fact that it exists shows just how bad it is. Now, this proves nothing. What this is, is a statement about his inner psychic experience. It really tells you nothing about the world, any more than Leibniz's idea that this is the best of all possible worlds tells you anything, right? It's more a state of mind than a logical procedure.

In addition to the idea that this is the worst of all possible worlds, remember when I called this the metaphysics from hell? Can you see why I think that the second proposition is that it is better not to be born, right? You're better off not existing at all.

Here's why. We are a bundle of desires. We are a collection of questions. Our desires never get satisfied, and our questions never get answered, right? And you're stuck with them. Schopenhauer just wants to throw in the towel, like, "Release me," but there's no God to pray to, so he does this, right?

You can see why this is bizarre but tremendously influential. It represents a certain state of mind. The reason why it is better never to have been born is that pleasure is purely negative.

In other words, when you have a desire for pleasure—food, sex, whatever it is that gives you pleasure—that's a state of deprivation, a state of being incomplete. When you get your desires gratified, well, you're happy for about 15 minutes, but they're going to come back, and you get the constant circulating round of desire.

You can't gratify them all, and even when you do, they don't stay gratified. He wants to eat lunch and never get hungry again. The fact is that you're going to get hungry again, and that's the way the world is. He says, "Well, that's exactly my point. Why do we need a world like this?

We'd be better off not having these sensations at all and not having any gratification of them." This is getting your desires gratified. You should see what he thinks about getting them not gratified, right? Do you see, I mean, the two really terrible things that could happen to you?

You can get what you want, or not get what you want. Right? This is the metaphysics from hell. Wicked philosophers are sent to hell and forced to think about this stuff, right?

No, and this, I mean, no wonder he wants to escape from being stuck in the prison of this ego, right? Anybody would. So asceticism, mysticism is the solution to the problem of the self, the solution to the problem of subjectivity and your relation to the external world.

The solution there is ethics and aesthetics. These are the highest achievements of man, and they don't amount to anything. You should see what the rest of the world is like, you see. Just relentless. It gets worse and worse and worse. It spirals down into an endless pit of permanent depression.

I guess his revenge on this cruel world is to turn this into a system of metaphysics and send it to us, right? So we could call this Schopenhauer's revenge. Now, alas, this revenge is of great consequence to the history of the West. He has been certainly a standard fixture in German culture since the middle of the 19th century.

Any educated person in the German-speaking world in the late 19th century would have been familiar with Schopenhauer. Certainly, it's clear that Freud was familiar with Schopenhauer; he grew up in Vienna. But also, if you think of the idea first of all of unconscious motivation, right?

Freud says that we are often not conscious of what really makes us go. You think that your consciousness is your will. It's not. That is not original to Freud. That is actually something introduced by Schopenhauer. Freud looks a great deal more original than he turns out to be.

If you haven't read Schopenhauer, and it's clear enough why people don't, right? But actually, he's pregnant with many of the themes that get developed later on in the next hundred years or so of German philosophy. The idea of consciousness as being a mere surface, there being a depth there that you really can't plumb.

Another theme that gets picked up by Freud, introduced by Schopenhauer, the theory of parapraxis, of Freudian slips. Schopenhauer says that reveals your real will, you idiot. You don't know what you will until you actually do it.

Then go back and examine yourself. That's what you will. Stop kidding yourself. In addition to that, the idea of sex as the focus of the will. Schopenhauer is very caught up with the body and desire. He says that the genitals are the focus of the will. What's more a more Freudian theme than that, right?

If you stop and think about it, the emphasis on irrational desire and irrational motivation that's going to become so pervasive in German culture in the late 19th and early 20th century, all anticipated in Schopenhauer.

A second cluster of themes that Schopenhauer is important for is the idea of art as redemption. Art as a new pseudo-secular path, if not to heaven, to some sort of secular blessedness. Nietzsche picks this up. But all the aesthetes of the late 19th century, the "art for art's sake" crowd, all pick up on this idea that if we cannot get access to the heaven of the Christian saints, perhaps we can get access to the earth of the pagan artists; that this is the best we could possibly do.

So art as redemption, a sort of secular religion. In a way, you could say that Schopenhauer is a sort of a philosophical formulation of German romanticism, right? Goethe over Luther, right? Redemption through art, through creativity, or through at least the apprehension of creativity rather than through some religious impossibility.

And the final, I guess, important theme that he introduces is the idea of will over intellect. In other words, intellect is, he describes it as the rider of a horse, right? And the horse is the will. The will moves you around, and the will is really making the decision.

Perhaps it would be an ill-tamed horse or a horse for which you don't have a bridle. You're going where it's going, and you think, and you like to believe that you're really leading it. In fact, it is pushing you around. Do not flatter yourself with your misconceptions about your own autonomy.

This leads over into a couple of tendencies in early 20th-century philosophy. First of all, vitalism of various kinds that we're going to see in Bergson. The other big tendency I would say is the voluntarism of people like Sorel and various kinds of later existentialist writers. Commit yourself to something authentic; commitment is going to be really important, and there’s going to be no ultimate rational ground for it.

Just go out and do something; don’t just stand there. So the idea of volunteering, of will pushing around, just will something, go out and do something great, gets picked up in many important parts of German culture.

A final thing I would say is that the sort of resistance to or disapproval of Christianity—he doesn't have much for the optimistic idea of salvation and reconciliation with God because the world is a giant vacuum to Schopenhauer.

So I would say that that gets picked up particularly by Nietzsche later on in the 20th century, and Nietzsche's writings are suffused with Schopenhauer. In other words, he in particular called Schopenhauer the only serious moralist of the 19th century.

I mean, Nietzsche loved Schopenhauer, and what it is is he's got a little more interesting and sprightly idea, and perhaps he's not so chronically depressed. But Nietzsche's influence on Schopenhauer is enormously important. The first time Nietzsche read "The World as Will and Idea," the next thing he did was read "In Other Words."

He read it twice in a row and said, "This is the best book I've seen in quite some time. This is my kind of book." Well, I think the thing speaks for itself.

In looking over Schopenhauer's corpus and his work as a whole, I would say he's not so important for the work itself. In other words, there are interesting themes that get introduced into philosophy in a very unique and rather queer way in this pessimistic mode.

His great importance lies in the fact that he influenced three or four subsequent generations of philosophers, particularly German philosophers, and they carried these themes out and then performed their own individual kind of twist or imposed their own individual kind of twist on these themes.

Think about a couple of them: Freud, with the idea of unconscious motivation, desire as a problem, and also think of Freud's pessimism. Think of things like "Civilization and Its Discontents." It's not as radical a pessimism as we get with Schopenhauer, but both of them agree that the human condition is basically made up of unsatisfied and unsatisfiable desires.

Now Freud is willing to say, "Well, that's not such a bad thing. The trade-off to give up civilization would be worse." In other words, he's a little less relentless, a little less complete in his negativity. But Freud's social philosophy or his kind of conception of the human condition is highly pessimistic and owes a great deal to Schopenhauer.

In addition to Freud, Nietzsche—the irrationalism of Nietzsche, the forsaking of rationality and the traditional optimism of the Enlightenment—all borrowed from Schopenhauer. In particular, the idea of taking Schopenhauer's idea of the will and transforming it into the will to power, which we see, like Schopenhauer, not just in individuals but in nature and in the world as a whole. Very clearly, the will to power is an extrapolation from Schopenhauer. There's no doubt about it. It's one of the most important ideas in Nietzsche.

A third figure that's very important for Schopenhauer, and it's kind of surprising, is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ludwig Wittgenstein is kind of a surprising choice here because he doesn't seem to have fallen into this philosophical pessimism that's so characteristic of Schopenhauer.

But it seems that Wittgenstein spent a great deal of time going back and reading this. Now, maybe this is connected with the fact that Wittgenstein spent most of his life depressed and near the edge of suicide.

I can't think that this helped him out any, right? But Wittgenstein was a chronically morose, chronically depressed individual, and perhaps that's what attracts him to this kind of thought, or perhaps it's just because he grew up in 19th-century Vienna.

The point is that Wittgenstein takes from Schopenhauer the idea of this kind of posture of melancholy, right? And the idea that we've reached the bounds of language when we come up to aesthetics.

What happens when we try and formulate aesthetics or ethics into language? We run up against the glass boundaries of language. We can't say anything. It turns into either mysticism or noise. Now, Wittgenstein says, "Well, that's not so bad at the end of the Tractatus. We cannot speak about. We must pass over in silence."

I think Wittgenstein is suggesting that it's there; we just can't talk about it. What Schopenhauer is saying is just—it’s just not there, right? So there's really no—there's no ethics. We're at the boundaries of language.

Then when we move up to these boundaries, what we get is symbols, gestures, and noise. Clearly, this is going to drive a man towards a sort of philosophical melancholy, if he isn't melancholic to begin with.

I'd be inclined to say, just concluding and finishing Schopenhauer up, that this combination of Kant, Indian mysticism, and Romantic Weltschmerz is a strange sort of brew. I mean, you wouldn't think that the human mind could connect all these things in the same conceptual framework.

I might be willing to take a sort of a Kierkegaardian reading of Schopenhauer. This is an ode to boredom. The world is full of nothing. The world is an empty vacuum. The world offers you nothing except misery. Nothing except negative experiences.

You might want to say that this is a sort of demonic inversion of pantheism. I mean, this is pantheism stood upside down. Instead of the world being full of God, the world is full of nothing. And that's the best you're going to get.

It gets worse, but the best you're going to do is be able to confront your nothing, confront your boredom, and then get involved with aesthetic contemplation. Renounce yourself, get involved with, say, asceticism or mysticism.

The point is that the problem of the world is insoluble. The problem of the self has no solution. We are left with a spiritual difficulty, a spiritual kind of tar pit that we can't pull ourselves out of before we succumb to death. He wants us to understand that it's the best thing we can do.