Let's explore the gloomy world of Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th-century German philosopher known for his pessimistic outlook on life.
From his troubled personal life to his groundbreaking ideas about human suffering and the nature of reality, we'll learn how Schopenhauer's philosophy still influences thinkers today.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English. The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our philosophical mini-series.
[00:00:26] In part one, in case you missed it, we talked about the innermost thoughts of Marcus Aurelius.
[00:00:31] In part three we are going to talk about the queen of capitalism and self-interest, Ayn Rand, and in today’s episode, part two, we are going to talk about the prince of pessimism, the 19th century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer.
[00:00:48] They are three pretty unrelated philosophers and thinkers, so you can quite happily listen to this episode without having listened to the previous one.
[00:00:57] So, let’s not waste a minute, and learn about Mr Gloomy, Arthur Schopenhauer.
[00:01:05] Philosophers throughout history have grappled with life’s big questions. What is man’s purpose? What is the nature of humanity? What is knowledge? What is right, and what is wrong?
[00:01:19] Ultimately, what is the meaning of life?
[00:01:23] As you heard in the last episode, Marcus Aurelius had an answer, or at least, he had a perspective on what actions and behaviours would result in a life well-lived.
[00:01:36] Virtue, integrity, and duty were all key factors. Do as nature intended you to do, be a good person, that is what humans were put on this earth to do.
[00:01:50] It’s therefore perhaps unsurprising that there is a renaissance of Marcus Aurelius fans, that his ideas have become so popular almost 2000 years after his death.
[00:02:02] They are nice, practical, easy to understand, and in their own way, positive and joyful.
[00:02:12] One philosopher who has not enjoyed such a renaissance, and whose conclusions on the meaning of life are anything but positive and playful, is the subject of today’s episode, Arthur Schopenhauer.
[00:02:26] He spent his life obsessed with the question not of how to live an honourable life, but of death, evil, destruction, violence, and the futility of man’s existence.
[00:02:40] We will go into his philosophy in detail in a moment, but first we need to talk a bit about his personal life, as there are several events that one imagines might have contributed to this gloomy outlook on life.
[00:02:55] Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in Gdansk.
[00:03:01] As you may know, Gdansk is in modern day Poland, but in 1788 it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
[00:03:11] Schopenhauer's father was a wealthy merchant, and although the young Arthur Shopenhauer didn’t really want to follow in his father’s footsteps, he felt the pressure to join the family business.
[00:03:24] He travelled around Europe to learn the craft, in preparation for his future career as a merchant.
[00:03:31] But in 1805, when he was 17 years old, his prospects changed dramatically.
[00:03:39] His father was found dead, drowned in a canal, with his mother concluding that he had committed suicide.
[00:03:48] Clearly, on an emotional level this must have been a very difficult thing for the teenage boy to deal with.
[00:03:55] But on a practical level, this left the young Schopenhauer with a considerable inheritance, and the ability–if he so chose–to pursue a life of thought and reflection rather than to have to go into business.
[00:04:11] He did follow a merchant career for a few years, but then switched paths, enrolling at the University of Gottingen to study medicine, before switching to a more philosophical track, first at Gottingen and then at University of Berlin.
[00:04:27] We’ll talk more about his academic career and his writings in a minute, but first, let’s ask ourselves what we know about Schopenhauer as a man.
[00:04:37] We know that he was a difficult person to be around.
[00:04:41] He had a terrible, strained relationship with his mother. This was the case throughout his childhood, but it was even more so after she entered into a new relationship after her husband, Schopenhauer’s father, killed himself.
[00:04:57] We can see this in a letter she sent her son, where she doesn’t mince her words, she doesn’t speak in indirect terms.
[00:05:06] " You are unbearable and burdensome and very hard to live with. All your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people."
[00:05:21] In other words, he was proud and difficult, not an easy person to like.
[00:05:27] And to think, this was coming from his own mother!
[00:05:31] From his journals, you can also get a sense of his arrogance and the belief that he was superior to others.
[00:05:41] In one note from his time at university, he described how much he wanted to point a pistol at his professor’s chest and ask him to clarify his nonsensical thoughts before shooting him.
[00:05:55] This professor was a famous philosopher called Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was one of the reasons that Schopenhauer had switched from Gottingen to Berlin, but Schopenhauer soon grew impatient and bored of his professor’s thoughts, believing that he, the student, was superior intellectually.
[00:06:17] And, as you heard, he wrote that he wanted to shoot him.
[00:06:21] He was clearly not a modest young man, and believed that he was the intellectual equal of great figures in German philosophy, both dead and alive.
[00:06:32] The problem was, it seemed that the only person who was able to truly appreciate Schopenahuer’s genius was Schopenhauer himself.
[00:06:42] So, it was time to publish his ideas, so the world could truly appreciate Schopenhauer for the genius that he knew he was.
[00:06:52] In 1818, he published his first and most famous book, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, or The World as Will and Representation as it’s normally translated in English.
[00:07:05] In this book, in The World as Will and Representation, a central theme is Schopenhauer both challenging and building on the ideas of the eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant.
[00:07:19] One of Kant’s most important ideas was that humans perceive the world through our own experience and intuition. We are unable to access the true nature of things, according to Kant, because we experience everything through our intuition and experience.
[00:07:40] Things that we take as real, like space and time, were not empirical realities, according to Kant, but rather ways in which humans perceive and therefore understand the world.
[00:07:56] Although they seem real to us, they do not truly exist independently of humans. Kant called these “phenomena”.
[00:08:06] And according to Kant, beyond these phenomena were something called “noumena”, the things in themself, the things that humans can never know or understand, because we can only access the world through our own intuition.
[00:08:22] Schopenhauer wasn’t happy with this explanation.
[00:08:26] He wanted to better, to go beyond, his intellectual hero Kant.
[00:08:32] He claimed he had discovered the elusive thing-in-itself, the real core behind all our perceptions that Kant said could never be discovered by human beings.
[00:08:43] This thing was something that he called ‘will’, or “Wille” in German.
[00:08:50] And I have to warn you, what he found wasn’t particularly uplifting.
[00:08:57] Schopenhauer defined will as a purposeless and never-ending striving for change, which is the cause of all human suffering.
[00:09:07] It lay at the essence of every part of nature, every object, every human thought and desire.
[00:09:15] In other words, at the core of humanity is something with no meaning, with humans existing in a world where nothing is ever settled or satisfied.
[00:09:26] This, I imagine you’ll agree, is a pretty pessimistic outlook.
[00:09:32] But the idea of will was useful for Schopenhauer, who was above all interested in the problem of evil.
[00:09:40] Will explained why there is always conflict, pain, and suffering in the world. By understanding will as the force behind everything, Schopenhauer showed that evil and struggle are natural parts of human life.
[00:09:56] He did, however, offer a way out from the sorrowful nature of reality.
[00:10:03] He said that by rejecting will, humans could escape from the restless dissatisfaction of the universe. There were several ways that one could do this: by achieving a mental composure through recognising that suffering is everywhere and endless, or through self-discipline to master one’s own will.
[00:10:25] You could do this by appreciating great art or beauty, which allowed you to temporarily silence the will.
[00:10:33] You could reject materialism and worldly pleasures, which would result in minimising complexity and therefore suffering, loosening the grip of the will on your existence.
[00:10:44] Ultimately, life was painful, but Schopenhauer did offer some solutions as to how we could minimise this pain.
[00:10:54] Obviously, not very uplifting, but an apt view of life for a man who lived a pretty miserable and isolated personal and professional life.
[00:11:05] Now, despite his disdain for his contemporaries, Schopenhauer found unexpected inspiration and validation from an entirely different philosophical tradition: Buddhism and Hinduism, which he admired and thought explained suffering well.
[00:11:23] You may have heard of the word Nirvanā.
[00:11:26] It‘s a concept in many Eastern religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism, where the self is annihilated, it is destroyed.
[00:11:35] The person who attains this perfect mental state is liberated from the endless cycle of change, destruction, and creation that characterises the world.
[00:11:48] It is very similar to Schopenhauer’s idea of ‘denial of the will’ – a state where humans had transcended suffering by rejecting the world’s natural state of striving and change.
[00:12:02] When he read about this and made the link, probably at Gottingen, it was a big personal victory for Schopenhauer.
[00:12:09] At this time in Germany, Eastern philosophies, and in particular the Hindu tradition, had taken on great prestige and authority, they had started to be held in high regard.
[00:12:22] The reason for this was the discovery of Sanskrit, an ancient literary language from the region.
[00:12:29] Linguists realised that European languages had many links to Sanskrit, which led many writers and philosophers to believe that ancient Indian civilisation was the origin of all later cultures, including Christian European culture.
[00:12:47] This gave classical Indian ideas a reputation for holding a universal wisdom that had been lost to history, so finding an idea similar to the destruction of the will in Buddhism gave Schopenhauer’s idea more authority.
[00:13:03] Now, although Schopenhauer wasn’t conventionally a religious man, he thought a lot about religion, both European and non-European, because he thought that there was little separating it from philosophy. Religion was just another way of trying to understand the world and especially the suffering it contained.
[00:13:26] But because religion explored profound questions in the form of metaphor and fables, it was the philosopher’s job to state its ideas more clearly.
[00:13:36] It was Schopenhauer’s job, and his fellow philosophers’ job.
[00:13:41] But of course, philosophers do not always agree.
[00:13:46] And we cannot talk about Schopenhauer without mentioning his colleague and nemesis, the more successful Hegel.
[00:13:54] To begin with, the two men had very different interpretations of the world.
[00:14:00] Hegel saw everything that existed as rational, defined by an essence that he called the “Absolute Idea”.
[00:14:09] Schopenhauer, on the other hand, believed that reason was one of the many illusions, or representations, that human beings perceived.
[00:14:18] It was not the true nature of reality.
[00:14:22] Remember that he believed the essence of reality was “will”, which was purposeless and not guided by rationality.
[00:14:32] And this was not a friendly rivalry of sparring partners who would meet to discuss their ideas and provide constructive criticism on each other’s work.
[00:14:43] Schopenhauer’s criticism of Hegel, who was Germany’s most celebrated thinker after Kant’s death in 1804, was personal and vindictive.
[00:14:53] Schopenhauer was not afraid to express his dislike of others and once said that anyone who read Hegel’s work without feeling like they were in a madhouse–a lunatic asylum–should themselves be diagnosed with a psychological disorder.
[00:15:09] As you can imagine, this vindictiveness and arrogance did not win him friends among fellow philosophers.
[00:15:16] He was so unpopular that he even failed to win an essay contest where he was the only entrant, he was the only person who entered the competition.
[00:15:27] He had made it clear when he submitted his essay that he expected to win the competition, but The Royal Danish Society, which was sponsoring the competition said, “sorry Schopenhauer, nope”.
[00:15:39] And when news of him failing to win a competition in which he was the only participant got out, he was furious.
[00:15:48] He spent a lot of the introduction to his next book ranting, complaining, about The Royal Danish Society, as well as the hated Fichte and Hegel.
[00:15:58] Given his prickly, difficult, personality, it‘s no surprise that Schopenhauer was a very solitary person throughout his life.
[00:16:07] He had many short-lived affairs, one of which produced an illegitimate child, but he never married or settled.
[00:16:15] Slowly, in the 1840s, he gathered a small group of supporters whom he referred to as his ‘apostles’. They were not philosophers but rather professional men, mostly lawyers, who kept track of references to his work in the press and published essays in defence of his philosophy.
[00:16:35] At the same time, he had been spending years trying to convince publishers to bring out a second edition of The World as Will and Representation.
[00:16:45] In 1844, aged 56, he finally succeeded. To his disappointment, the second edition was not any more successful than the first edition and there were lots of negative reviews in scholarly journals.
[00:17:01] His big break, if we can call it that, came late in 1853 with a positive review in the prestigious British journal The Westminster Review. People finally began travelling to see him speak, perhaps now, in his 60s, people had started to wise up to his genius.
[00:17:20] The universities of Bonn and Breslau started giving lectures on his philosophy and in 1856 the University of Leipzig honoured his work by sponsoring a prize contest for the best essays on his philosophy.
[00:17:35] Of course, the ever-critical Schopenhauer did not approve of the winning entry.
[00:17:41] In 1860, aged 72, Schopenhauer began suffering heart palpitations and fainting fits.
[00:17:49] He knew that he was dying but this did not weaken his characteristic defiance.
[00:17:55] To the end, Schopenhauer stuck by his philosophical principles. He had argued in his work that death could never be a complete annihilation because, like all the perceptions that we humans have of the physical world, it was unreal.
[00:18:12] On September the 18th, 1860, Schopenhauer told a visitor that he did not fear death but rather what philosophy professors would do with his work after he was gone.
[00:18:25] He died on September the 26th of 1860.
[00:18:29] As he had predicted, his final escape from the world of suffering was not the end.
[00:18:35] His reputation grew over the following century. Albert Einstein called him a genius for his work on ethics and admired him greatly, even having his portrait hung on his office wall.
[00:18:49] As to his legacy more broadly, he was one of the earliest prominent Western philosophers to seriously engage with Hindu and Buddhist traditions and can be credited with helping to introduce these ideas to Western philosophy.
[00:19:03] Yes, German and European intellectuals were interested in classical Indian culture. However, most of them approached Indian literature and philosophy from an anthropological or literary perspective.
[00:19:17] Schopenhauer uniquely integrated these ideas into his own philosophical framework, saying that ideas in Indian philosophy could actually help Europeans understand the world better.
[00:19:30] Grumpy and not particularly fun to be around, he surely was, but his unique synthesis of Western and Eastern thought, and his insights into the role of human will in driving suffering, have cemented his importance as an influential voice in modern philosophy.
[00:19:49] OK then, that is it for Arthur Schopenhauer, a man for whom life had no meaning, but a man who certainly left his mark.
[00:19:57] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:01] Have you read much Schopenhauer? Are you one of his apostles? What do you think we can learn from his gloominess?
[00:20:07] The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com
[00:20:13] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:18] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English. The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our philosophical mini-series.
[00:00:26] In part one, in case you missed it, we talked about the innermost thoughts of Marcus Aurelius.
[00:00:31] In part three we are going to talk about the queen of capitalism and self-interest, Ayn Rand, and in today’s episode, part two, we are going to talk about the prince of pessimism, the 19th century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer.
[00:00:48] They are three pretty unrelated philosophers and thinkers, so you can quite happily listen to this episode without having listened to the previous one.
[00:00:57] So, let’s not waste a minute, and learn about Mr Gloomy, Arthur Schopenhauer.
[00:01:05] Philosophers throughout history have grappled with life’s big questions. What is man’s purpose? What is the nature of humanity? What is knowledge? What is right, and what is wrong?
[00:01:19] Ultimately, what is the meaning of life?
[00:01:23] As you heard in the last episode, Marcus Aurelius had an answer, or at least, he had a perspective on what actions and behaviours would result in a life well-lived.
[00:01:36] Virtue, integrity, and duty were all key factors. Do as nature intended you to do, be a good person, that is what humans were put on this earth to do.
[00:01:50] It’s therefore perhaps unsurprising that there is a renaissance of Marcus Aurelius fans, that his ideas have become so popular almost 2000 years after his death.
[00:02:02] They are nice, practical, easy to understand, and in their own way, positive and joyful.
[00:02:12] One philosopher who has not enjoyed such a renaissance, and whose conclusions on the meaning of life are anything but positive and playful, is the subject of today’s episode, Arthur Schopenhauer.
[00:02:26] He spent his life obsessed with the question not of how to live an honourable life, but of death, evil, destruction, violence, and the futility of man’s existence.
[00:02:40] We will go into his philosophy in detail in a moment, but first we need to talk a bit about his personal life, as there are several events that one imagines might have contributed to this gloomy outlook on life.
[00:02:55] Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in Gdansk.
[00:03:01] As you may know, Gdansk is in modern day Poland, but in 1788 it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
[00:03:11] Schopenhauer's father was a wealthy merchant, and although the young Arthur Shopenhauer didn’t really want to follow in his father’s footsteps, he felt the pressure to join the family business.
[00:03:24] He travelled around Europe to learn the craft, in preparation for his future career as a merchant.
[00:03:31] But in 1805, when he was 17 years old, his prospects changed dramatically.
[00:03:39] His father was found dead, drowned in a canal, with his mother concluding that he had committed suicide.
[00:03:48] Clearly, on an emotional level this must have been a very difficult thing for the teenage boy to deal with.
[00:03:55] But on a practical level, this left the young Schopenhauer with a considerable inheritance, and the ability–if he so chose–to pursue a life of thought and reflection rather than to have to go into business.
[00:04:11] He did follow a merchant career for a few years, but then switched paths, enrolling at the University of Gottingen to study medicine, before switching to a more philosophical track, first at Gottingen and then at University of Berlin.
[00:04:27] We’ll talk more about his academic career and his writings in a minute, but first, let’s ask ourselves what we know about Schopenhauer as a man.
[00:04:37] We know that he was a difficult person to be around.
[00:04:41] He had a terrible, strained relationship with his mother. This was the case throughout his childhood, but it was even more so after she entered into a new relationship after her husband, Schopenhauer’s father, killed himself.
[00:04:57] We can see this in a letter she sent her son, where she doesn’t mince her words, she doesn’t speak in indirect terms.
[00:05:06] " You are unbearable and burdensome and very hard to live with. All your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people."
[00:05:21] In other words, he was proud and difficult, not an easy person to like.
[00:05:27] And to think, this was coming from his own mother!
[00:05:31] From his journals, you can also get a sense of his arrogance and the belief that he was superior to others.
[00:05:41] In one note from his time at university, he described how much he wanted to point a pistol at his professor’s chest and ask him to clarify his nonsensical thoughts before shooting him.
[00:05:55] This professor was a famous philosopher called Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was one of the reasons that Schopenhauer had switched from Gottingen to Berlin, but Schopenhauer soon grew impatient and bored of his professor’s thoughts, believing that he, the student, was superior intellectually.
[00:06:17] And, as you heard, he wrote that he wanted to shoot him.
[00:06:21] He was clearly not a modest young man, and believed that he was the intellectual equal of great figures in German philosophy, both dead and alive.
[00:06:32] The problem was, it seemed that the only person who was able to truly appreciate Schopenahuer’s genius was Schopenhauer himself.
[00:06:42] So, it was time to publish his ideas, so the world could truly appreciate Schopenhauer for the genius that he knew he was.
[00:06:52] In 1818, he published his first and most famous book, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, or The World as Will and Representation as it’s normally translated in English.
[00:07:05] In this book, in The World as Will and Representation, a central theme is Schopenhauer both challenging and building on the ideas of the eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant.
[00:07:19] One of Kant’s most important ideas was that humans perceive the world through our own experience and intuition. We are unable to access the true nature of things, according to Kant, because we experience everything through our intuition and experience.
[00:07:40] Things that we take as real, like space and time, were not empirical realities, according to Kant, but rather ways in which humans perceive and therefore understand the world.
[00:07:56] Although they seem real to us, they do not truly exist independently of humans. Kant called these “phenomena”.
[00:08:06] And according to Kant, beyond these phenomena were something called “noumena”, the things in themself, the things that humans can never know or understand, because we can only access the world through our own intuition.
[00:08:22] Schopenhauer wasn’t happy with this explanation.
[00:08:26] He wanted to better, to go beyond, his intellectual hero Kant.
[00:08:32] He claimed he had discovered the elusive thing-in-itself, the real core behind all our perceptions that Kant said could never be discovered by human beings.
[00:08:43] This thing was something that he called ‘will’, or “Wille” in German.
[00:08:50] And I have to warn you, what he found wasn’t particularly uplifting.
[00:08:57] Schopenhauer defined will as a purposeless and never-ending striving for change, which is the cause of all human suffering.
[00:09:07] It lay at the essence of every part of nature, every object, every human thought and desire.
[00:09:15] In other words, at the core of humanity is something with no meaning, with humans existing in a world where nothing is ever settled or satisfied.
[00:09:26] This, I imagine you’ll agree, is a pretty pessimistic outlook.
[00:09:32] But the idea of will was useful for Schopenhauer, who was above all interested in the problem of evil.
[00:09:40] Will explained why there is always conflict, pain, and suffering in the world. By understanding will as the force behind everything, Schopenhauer showed that evil and struggle are natural parts of human life.
[00:09:56] He did, however, offer a way out from the sorrowful nature of reality.
[00:10:03] He said that by rejecting will, humans could escape from the restless dissatisfaction of the universe. There were several ways that one could do this: by achieving a mental composure through recognising that suffering is everywhere and endless, or through self-discipline to master one’s own will.
[00:10:25] You could do this by appreciating great art or beauty, which allowed you to temporarily silence the will.
[00:10:33] You could reject materialism and worldly pleasures, which would result in minimising complexity and therefore suffering, loosening the grip of the will on your existence.
[00:10:44] Ultimately, life was painful, but Schopenhauer did offer some solutions as to how we could minimise this pain.
[00:10:54] Obviously, not very uplifting, but an apt view of life for a man who lived a pretty miserable and isolated personal and professional life.
[00:11:05] Now, despite his disdain for his contemporaries, Schopenhauer found unexpected inspiration and validation from an entirely different philosophical tradition: Buddhism and Hinduism, which he admired and thought explained suffering well.
[00:11:23] You may have heard of the word Nirvanā.
[00:11:26] It‘s a concept in many Eastern religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism, where the self is annihilated, it is destroyed.
[00:11:35] The person who attains this perfect mental state is liberated from the endless cycle of change, destruction, and creation that characterises the world.
[00:11:48] It is very similar to Schopenhauer’s idea of ‘denial of the will’ – a state where humans had transcended suffering by rejecting the world’s natural state of striving and change.
[00:12:02] When he read about this and made the link, probably at Gottingen, it was a big personal victory for Schopenhauer.
[00:12:09] At this time in Germany, Eastern philosophies, and in particular the Hindu tradition, had taken on great prestige and authority, they had started to be held in high regard.
[00:12:22] The reason for this was the discovery of Sanskrit, an ancient literary language from the region.
[00:12:29] Linguists realised that European languages had many links to Sanskrit, which led many writers and philosophers to believe that ancient Indian civilisation was the origin of all later cultures, including Christian European culture.
[00:12:47] This gave classical Indian ideas a reputation for holding a universal wisdom that had been lost to history, so finding an idea similar to the destruction of the will in Buddhism gave Schopenhauer’s idea more authority.
[00:13:03] Now, although Schopenhauer wasn’t conventionally a religious man, he thought a lot about religion, both European and non-European, because he thought that there was little separating it from philosophy. Religion was just another way of trying to understand the world and especially the suffering it contained.
[00:13:26] But because religion explored profound questions in the form of metaphor and fables, it was the philosopher’s job to state its ideas more clearly.
[00:13:36] It was Schopenhauer’s job, and his fellow philosophers’ job.
[00:13:41] But of course, philosophers do not always agree.
[00:13:46] And we cannot talk about Schopenhauer without mentioning his colleague and nemesis, the more successful Hegel.
[00:13:54] To begin with, the two men had very different interpretations of the world.
[00:14:00] Hegel saw everything that existed as rational, defined by an essence that he called the “Absolute Idea”.
[00:14:09] Schopenhauer, on the other hand, believed that reason was one of the many illusions, or representations, that human beings perceived.
[00:14:18] It was not the true nature of reality.
[00:14:22] Remember that he believed the essence of reality was “will”, which was purposeless and not guided by rationality.
[00:14:32] And this was not a friendly rivalry of sparring partners who would meet to discuss their ideas and provide constructive criticism on each other’s work.
[00:14:43] Schopenhauer’s criticism of Hegel, who was Germany’s most celebrated thinker after Kant’s death in 1804, was personal and vindictive.
[00:14:53] Schopenhauer was not afraid to express his dislike of others and once said that anyone who read Hegel’s work without feeling like they were in a madhouse–a lunatic asylum–should themselves be diagnosed with a psychological disorder.
[00:15:09] As you can imagine, this vindictiveness and arrogance did not win him friends among fellow philosophers.
[00:15:16] He was so unpopular that he even failed to win an essay contest where he was the only entrant, he was the only person who entered the competition.
[00:15:27] He had made it clear when he submitted his essay that he expected to win the competition, but The Royal Danish Society, which was sponsoring the competition said, “sorry Schopenhauer, nope”.
[00:15:39] And when news of him failing to win a competition in which he was the only participant got out, he was furious.
[00:15:48] He spent a lot of the introduction to his next book ranting, complaining, about The Royal Danish Society, as well as the hated Fichte and Hegel.
[00:15:58] Given his prickly, difficult, personality, it‘s no surprise that Schopenhauer was a very solitary person throughout his life.
[00:16:07] He had many short-lived affairs, one of which produced an illegitimate child, but he never married or settled.
[00:16:15] Slowly, in the 1840s, he gathered a small group of supporters whom he referred to as his ‘apostles’. They were not philosophers but rather professional men, mostly lawyers, who kept track of references to his work in the press and published essays in defence of his philosophy.
[00:16:35] At the same time, he had been spending years trying to convince publishers to bring out a second edition of The World as Will and Representation.
[00:16:45] In 1844, aged 56, he finally succeeded. To his disappointment, the second edition was not any more successful than the first edition and there were lots of negative reviews in scholarly journals.
[00:17:01] His big break, if we can call it that, came late in 1853 with a positive review in the prestigious British journal The Westminster Review. People finally began travelling to see him speak, perhaps now, in his 60s, people had started to wise up to his genius.
[00:17:20] The universities of Bonn and Breslau started giving lectures on his philosophy and in 1856 the University of Leipzig honoured his work by sponsoring a prize contest for the best essays on his philosophy.
[00:17:35] Of course, the ever-critical Schopenhauer did not approve of the winning entry.
[00:17:41] In 1860, aged 72, Schopenhauer began suffering heart palpitations and fainting fits.
[00:17:49] He knew that he was dying but this did not weaken his characteristic defiance.
[00:17:55] To the end, Schopenhauer stuck by his philosophical principles. He had argued in his work that death could never be a complete annihilation because, like all the perceptions that we humans have of the physical world, it was unreal.
[00:18:12] On September the 18th, 1860, Schopenhauer told a visitor that he did not fear death but rather what philosophy professors would do with his work after he was gone.
[00:18:25] He died on September the 26th of 1860.
[00:18:29] As he had predicted, his final escape from the world of suffering was not the end.
[00:18:35] His reputation grew over the following century. Albert Einstein called him a genius for his work on ethics and admired him greatly, even having his portrait hung on his office wall.
[00:18:49] As to his legacy more broadly, he was one of the earliest prominent Western philosophers to seriously engage with Hindu and Buddhist traditions and can be credited with helping to introduce these ideas to Western philosophy.
[00:19:03] Yes, German and European intellectuals were interested in classical Indian culture. However, most of them approached Indian literature and philosophy from an anthropological or literary perspective.
[00:19:17] Schopenhauer uniquely integrated these ideas into his own philosophical framework, saying that ideas in Indian philosophy could actually help Europeans understand the world better.
[00:19:30] Grumpy and not particularly fun to be around, he surely was, but his unique synthesis of Western and Eastern thought, and his insights into the role of human will in driving suffering, have cemented his importance as an influential voice in modern philosophy.
[00:19:49] OK then, that is it for Arthur Schopenhauer, a man for whom life had no meaning, but a man who certainly left his mark.
[00:19:57] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:01] Have you read much Schopenhauer? Are you one of his apostles? What do you think we can learn from his gloominess?
[00:20:07] The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com
[00:20:13] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:18] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English. The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our philosophical mini-series.
[00:00:26] In part one, in case you missed it, we talked about the innermost thoughts of Marcus Aurelius.
[00:00:31] In part three we are going to talk about the queen of capitalism and self-interest, Ayn Rand, and in today’s episode, part two, we are going to talk about the prince of pessimism, the 19th century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer.
[00:00:48] They are three pretty unrelated philosophers and thinkers, so you can quite happily listen to this episode without having listened to the previous one.
[00:00:57] So, let’s not waste a minute, and learn about Mr Gloomy, Arthur Schopenhauer.
[00:01:05] Philosophers throughout history have grappled with life’s big questions. What is man’s purpose? What is the nature of humanity? What is knowledge? What is right, and what is wrong?
[00:01:19] Ultimately, what is the meaning of life?
[00:01:23] As you heard in the last episode, Marcus Aurelius had an answer, or at least, he had a perspective on what actions and behaviours would result in a life well-lived.
[00:01:36] Virtue, integrity, and duty were all key factors. Do as nature intended you to do, be a good person, that is what humans were put on this earth to do.
[00:01:50] It’s therefore perhaps unsurprising that there is a renaissance of Marcus Aurelius fans, that his ideas have become so popular almost 2000 years after his death.
[00:02:02] They are nice, practical, easy to understand, and in their own way, positive and joyful.
[00:02:12] One philosopher who has not enjoyed such a renaissance, and whose conclusions on the meaning of life are anything but positive and playful, is the subject of today’s episode, Arthur Schopenhauer.
[00:02:26] He spent his life obsessed with the question not of how to live an honourable life, but of death, evil, destruction, violence, and the futility of man’s existence.
[00:02:40] We will go into his philosophy in detail in a moment, but first we need to talk a bit about his personal life, as there are several events that one imagines might have contributed to this gloomy outlook on life.
[00:02:55] Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in Gdansk.
[00:03:01] As you may know, Gdansk is in modern day Poland, but in 1788 it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
[00:03:11] Schopenhauer's father was a wealthy merchant, and although the young Arthur Shopenhauer didn’t really want to follow in his father’s footsteps, he felt the pressure to join the family business.
[00:03:24] He travelled around Europe to learn the craft, in preparation for his future career as a merchant.
[00:03:31] But in 1805, when he was 17 years old, his prospects changed dramatically.
[00:03:39] His father was found dead, drowned in a canal, with his mother concluding that he had committed suicide.
[00:03:48] Clearly, on an emotional level this must have been a very difficult thing for the teenage boy to deal with.
[00:03:55] But on a practical level, this left the young Schopenhauer with a considerable inheritance, and the ability–if he so chose–to pursue a life of thought and reflection rather than to have to go into business.
[00:04:11] He did follow a merchant career for a few years, but then switched paths, enrolling at the University of Gottingen to study medicine, before switching to a more philosophical track, first at Gottingen and then at University of Berlin.
[00:04:27] We’ll talk more about his academic career and his writings in a minute, but first, let’s ask ourselves what we know about Schopenhauer as a man.
[00:04:37] We know that he was a difficult person to be around.
[00:04:41] He had a terrible, strained relationship with his mother. This was the case throughout his childhood, but it was even more so after she entered into a new relationship after her husband, Schopenhauer’s father, killed himself.
[00:04:57] We can see this in a letter she sent her son, where she doesn’t mince her words, she doesn’t speak in indirect terms.
[00:05:06] " You are unbearable and burdensome and very hard to live with. All your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people."
[00:05:21] In other words, he was proud and difficult, not an easy person to like.
[00:05:27] And to think, this was coming from his own mother!
[00:05:31] From his journals, you can also get a sense of his arrogance and the belief that he was superior to others.
[00:05:41] In one note from his time at university, he described how much he wanted to point a pistol at his professor’s chest and ask him to clarify his nonsensical thoughts before shooting him.
[00:05:55] This professor was a famous philosopher called Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was one of the reasons that Schopenhauer had switched from Gottingen to Berlin, but Schopenhauer soon grew impatient and bored of his professor’s thoughts, believing that he, the student, was superior intellectually.
[00:06:17] And, as you heard, he wrote that he wanted to shoot him.
[00:06:21] He was clearly not a modest young man, and believed that he was the intellectual equal of great figures in German philosophy, both dead and alive.
[00:06:32] The problem was, it seemed that the only person who was able to truly appreciate Schopenahuer’s genius was Schopenhauer himself.
[00:06:42] So, it was time to publish his ideas, so the world could truly appreciate Schopenhauer for the genius that he knew he was.
[00:06:52] In 1818, he published his first and most famous book, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, or The World as Will and Representation as it’s normally translated in English.
[00:07:05] In this book, in The World as Will and Representation, a central theme is Schopenhauer both challenging and building on the ideas of the eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant.
[00:07:19] One of Kant’s most important ideas was that humans perceive the world through our own experience and intuition. We are unable to access the true nature of things, according to Kant, because we experience everything through our intuition and experience.
[00:07:40] Things that we take as real, like space and time, were not empirical realities, according to Kant, but rather ways in which humans perceive and therefore understand the world.
[00:07:56] Although they seem real to us, they do not truly exist independently of humans. Kant called these “phenomena”.
[00:08:06] And according to Kant, beyond these phenomena were something called “noumena”, the things in themself, the things that humans can never know or understand, because we can only access the world through our own intuition.
[00:08:22] Schopenhauer wasn’t happy with this explanation.
[00:08:26] He wanted to better, to go beyond, his intellectual hero Kant.
[00:08:32] He claimed he had discovered the elusive thing-in-itself, the real core behind all our perceptions that Kant said could never be discovered by human beings.
[00:08:43] This thing was something that he called ‘will’, or “Wille” in German.
[00:08:50] And I have to warn you, what he found wasn’t particularly uplifting.
[00:08:57] Schopenhauer defined will as a purposeless and never-ending striving for change, which is the cause of all human suffering.
[00:09:07] It lay at the essence of every part of nature, every object, every human thought and desire.
[00:09:15] In other words, at the core of humanity is something with no meaning, with humans existing in a world where nothing is ever settled or satisfied.
[00:09:26] This, I imagine you’ll agree, is a pretty pessimistic outlook.
[00:09:32] But the idea of will was useful for Schopenhauer, who was above all interested in the problem of evil.
[00:09:40] Will explained why there is always conflict, pain, and suffering in the world. By understanding will as the force behind everything, Schopenhauer showed that evil and struggle are natural parts of human life.
[00:09:56] He did, however, offer a way out from the sorrowful nature of reality.
[00:10:03] He said that by rejecting will, humans could escape from the restless dissatisfaction of the universe. There were several ways that one could do this: by achieving a mental composure through recognising that suffering is everywhere and endless, or through self-discipline to master one’s own will.
[00:10:25] You could do this by appreciating great art or beauty, which allowed you to temporarily silence the will.
[00:10:33] You could reject materialism and worldly pleasures, which would result in minimising complexity and therefore suffering, loosening the grip of the will on your existence.
[00:10:44] Ultimately, life was painful, but Schopenhauer did offer some solutions as to how we could minimise this pain.
[00:10:54] Obviously, not very uplifting, but an apt view of life for a man who lived a pretty miserable and isolated personal and professional life.
[00:11:05] Now, despite his disdain for his contemporaries, Schopenhauer found unexpected inspiration and validation from an entirely different philosophical tradition: Buddhism and Hinduism, which he admired and thought explained suffering well.
[00:11:23] You may have heard of the word Nirvanā.
[00:11:26] It‘s a concept in many Eastern religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism, where the self is annihilated, it is destroyed.
[00:11:35] The person who attains this perfect mental state is liberated from the endless cycle of change, destruction, and creation that characterises the world.
[00:11:48] It is very similar to Schopenhauer’s idea of ‘denial of the will’ – a state where humans had transcended suffering by rejecting the world’s natural state of striving and change.
[00:12:02] When he read about this and made the link, probably at Gottingen, it was a big personal victory for Schopenhauer.
[00:12:09] At this time in Germany, Eastern philosophies, and in particular the Hindu tradition, had taken on great prestige and authority, they had started to be held in high regard.
[00:12:22] The reason for this was the discovery of Sanskrit, an ancient literary language from the region.
[00:12:29] Linguists realised that European languages had many links to Sanskrit, which led many writers and philosophers to believe that ancient Indian civilisation was the origin of all later cultures, including Christian European culture.
[00:12:47] This gave classical Indian ideas a reputation for holding a universal wisdom that had been lost to history, so finding an idea similar to the destruction of the will in Buddhism gave Schopenhauer’s idea more authority.
[00:13:03] Now, although Schopenhauer wasn’t conventionally a religious man, he thought a lot about religion, both European and non-European, because he thought that there was little separating it from philosophy. Religion was just another way of trying to understand the world and especially the suffering it contained.
[00:13:26] But because religion explored profound questions in the form of metaphor and fables, it was the philosopher’s job to state its ideas more clearly.
[00:13:36] It was Schopenhauer’s job, and his fellow philosophers’ job.
[00:13:41] But of course, philosophers do not always agree.
[00:13:46] And we cannot talk about Schopenhauer without mentioning his colleague and nemesis, the more successful Hegel.
[00:13:54] To begin with, the two men had very different interpretations of the world.
[00:14:00] Hegel saw everything that existed as rational, defined by an essence that he called the “Absolute Idea”.
[00:14:09] Schopenhauer, on the other hand, believed that reason was one of the many illusions, or representations, that human beings perceived.
[00:14:18] It was not the true nature of reality.
[00:14:22] Remember that he believed the essence of reality was “will”, which was purposeless and not guided by rationality.
[00:14:32] And this was not a friendly rivalry of sparring partners who would meet to discuss their ideas and provide constructive criticism on each other’s work.
[00:14:43] Schopenhauer’s criticism of Hegel, who was Germany’s most celebrated thinker after Kant’s death in 1804, was personal and vindictive.
[00:14:53] Schopenhauer was not afraid to express his dislike of others and once said that anyone who read Hegel’s work without feeling like they were in a madhouse–a lunatic asylum–should themselves be diagnosed with a psychological disorder.
[00:15:09] As you can imagine, this vindictiveness and arrogance did not win him friends among fellow philosophers.
[00:15:16] He was so unpopular that he even failed to win an essay contest where he was the only entrant, he was the only person who entered the competition.
[00:15:27] He had made it clear when he submitted his essay that he expected to win the competition, but The Royal Danish Society, which was sponsoring the competition said, “sorry Schopenhauer, nope”.
[00:15:39] And when news of him failing to win a competition in which he was the only participant got out, he was furious.
[00:15:48] He spent a lot of the introduction to his next book ranting, complaining, about The Royal Danish Society, as well as the hated Fichte and Hegel.
[00:15:58] Given his prickly, difficult, personality, it‘s no surprise that Schopenhauer was a very solitary person throughout his life.
[00:16:07] He had many short-lived affairs, one of which produced an illegitimate child, but he never married or settled.
[00:16:15] Slowly, in the 1840s, he gathered a small group of supporters whom he referred to as his ‘apostles’. They were not philosophers but rather professional men, mostly lawyers, who kept track of references to his work in the press and published essays in defence of his philosophy.
[00:16:35] At the same time, he had been spending years trying to convince publishers to bring out a second edition of The World as Will and Representation.
[00:16:45] In 1844, aged 56, he finally succeeded. To his disappointment, the second edition was not any more successful than the first edition and there were lots of negative reviews in scholarly journals.
[00:17:01] His big break, if we can call it that, came late in 1853 with a positive review in the prestigious British journal The Westminster Review. People finally began travelling to see him speak, perhaps now, in his 60s, people had started to wise up to his genius.
[00:17:20] The universities of Bonn and Breslau started giving lectures on his philosophy and in 1856 the University of Leipzig honoured his work by sponsoring a prize contest for the best essays on his philosophy.
[00:17:35] Of course, the ever-critical Schopenhauer did not approve of the winning entry.
[00:17:41] In 1860, aged 72, Schopenhauer began suffering heart palpitations and fainting fits.
[00:17:49] He knew that he was dying but this did not weaken his characteristic defiance.
[00:17:55] To the end, Schopenhauer stuck by his philosophical principles. He had argued in his work that death could never be a complete annihilation because, like all the perceptions that we humans have of the physical world, it was unreal.
[00:18:12] On September the 18th, 1860, Schopenhauer told a visitor that he did not fear death but rather what philosophy professors would do with his work after he was gone.
[00:18:25] He died on September the 26th of 1860.
[00:18:29] As he had predicted, his final escape from the world of suffering was not the end.
[00:18:35] His reputation grew over the following century. Albert Einstein called him a genius for his work on ethics and admired him greatly, even having his portrait hung on his office wall.
[00:18:49] As to his legacy more broadly, he was one of the earliest prominent Western philosophers to seriously engage with Hindu and Buddhist traditions and can be credited with helping to introduce these ideas to Western philosophy.
[00:19:03] Yes, German and European intellectuals were interested in classical Indian culture. However, most of them approached Indian literature and philosophy from an anthropological or literary perspective.
[00:19:17] Schopenhauer uniquely integrated these ideas into his own philosophical framework, saying that ideas in Indian philosophy could actually help Europeans understand the world better.
[00:19:30] Grumpy and not particularly fun to be around, he surely was, but his unique synthesis of Western and Eastern thought, and his insights into the role of human will in driving suffering, have cemented his importance as an influential voice in modern philosophy.
[00:19:49] OK then, that is it for Arthur Schopenhauer, a man for whom life had no meaning, but a man who certainly left his mark.
[00:19:57] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:01] Have you read much Schopenhauer? Are you one of his apostles? What do you think we can learn from his gloominess?
[00:20:07] The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com
[00:20:13] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:18] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
