Schopenhauer In-Depth: The Total Denial of the World by the Greatest Pessimist of Philosophy

Cound t agree more

I second that.

Could use some dubstep

"Without music life would seem like an error." --Nietzsche

@James I'm sure he meant dubstep

@joeybeann definitely

Would you please tell me what you find appealing in Dostoyevsky`s books? The English-language translation? I know Russian and his stories are such a oboring and tedious read. And it`s in the mid-19th century Russian that is not spoken today. And Dostoyevsky deals with problems of his time - to smear the revolutionaries and their anti-Christian ideas.
I wonder what Dostoyevsky thought about Schopenhauer. I`ve never been able to track it down.

@peter ivankovich I haven't read him in Russian, so I can't judge his original literary style. I have read him in various translations, and they vary in quality. But I disagree that he only discusses the issues of his time. It's true that he does that, but he was a visionary who saw clearly that the West was headed for an epoch of solipsism, materialism, and hedonism. He foresaw the collapse of our shared values, and the atomisation of society. For him, the solution was Orthodox Christianity. You might disagree with that, but it's hard to deny that he diagnosed the crisis of late capitalism very well, and with incredible psychological insight. He's less perfect as a writer than Tolstoy, but I think deeper, philosophically, especially in his treatment of ethics.

@Write Dangerously I appreciate your well-reasoned response. Still I ask myself why Dostoevsky liked to have a good time in the West while moralizing Russians. His gambling sins in Germany impelled him to write some of his best books like Crime and Punishment and Idiot, to cite just a couple. He loved Western sins. And barred them to his compatriots in Russia who could not afford traveling out to the West to enjoy capitalistic sins? Again, if you look at the atomized Western world, the vast majority of "free" people seem to be enjoying their accessibility to various sins, as per Dostoevsky,. Nowadays few people view those things as sin but rather as much-vaunted personal choice. A modern slogan is my body, my choice. Sin in appropriate places and according to established rules - sin as long as you don`t hurt others. What Dostoevsky saw as regress, the West embraces it as progress... People often tend to detect prophetic predictions in old books where authors had none. When reading Dostoevsky`s books, I saw nothing in them but Dostoevsky settling scores with his ideological rivals. Many of his characters are recognizable people of note in his time whom he ridicules in his stories. For example, he inserts a famous Russian writer Turgenev in disguised form in Devils. Personally, reading Dostoevsky I got the impression that he was belaboring his own thoughts for or against something. To be sure, after batting around an idea through his characters, his own point of view came out on top. He ridiculed his characters who held an opposing view.
A buddy pf mine tried to start in on works by Dostoevsky in chronological order. He gave up soon. He said his impression was that Dostoevsky`s characters stood out for being consumptives. Nearly everybody coughed in his books, he said. If you look at the book Idiot , you learn right away that the positive principal character had Dostoevsky`s personal traits - epilepsy. That was Dostoevsky`s favorite pastime - to cough and have epileptic fits. It`s just a hint for careful readers that he himself rules the roost in his books.
Yes, he stood for Russian Orthodoxy but he wanted a refashioned Russian Orthodoxy, if you follow his thoughts in his books very carefully. The way some knowing critics put it, he wants to take Russia into the past, not the future. Dostoevsky wrote that Western values were not good for Russia. That`s exactly what comrade Putin feeds into his anti-western propaganda. Russia doesn`t need decadent western ideas. While Western countries raise voluminous outcry that Russia is against our democratic values. A battle of words to vilify the other... Dostoevsky wasn`t the only one back at that time to condemn capitalism. Plenty of writers across Europe did it one way or another. Some took capitalism as an unavoidable given, others clamored for change. Dostoevsky couldn`t have known that the US would become the sturdy mainstay of global capitalism. Without the US and its tight grip on the system of capitalism, the world would probably have evolved into a different structure.
I still have a problem with people claiming that Dostoevsky had deep psychological insight. Even if greats like Nietzsche claimed it. To my way of thinking, Dostoevsky doesn`t extract insight, he produces it. He produces any "insight" he desires. To get insight, one has to collect it, not to manufacture it.
Dostoevsky wishes for (Russian) people to be morally pure with ethical rectitude. So create all people to be alike? I once asked a rapist if he would like it if all people on Earth were like him. His answer surprised me. Yes. What a wonderful world would it be if all people looked and were like him. The notion of boring didn`t even enter his head.
I`ve met people who say with conviction that everybody should read Dostoevsky. Maybe that`s right. But the funny thing is when I interact with people, I find it impossible to tell if they are even familiar with Dostoevsky. beyond the name. The other day a guy mentioned a book by Dostoevsky. The book that was written by Solzhenitsyn. This guy teaches preschool. The vast majority of my American acquaintances say without hesitation that capitalism is the best system in the world. And then they go either to work a mandatory 12-hours a day or deal dope. Teamwork (an American substitute for a collective) occurs only in slogans by politicians or in the US Army.
I think most of human life consists in screwing with the mind of other. So Dostoevsky comes across to me as one such screwer of the minds.
An American acquaintance of mine who`s in the medical profession once told me that he`d started out as a psychologist. He said he felt this job consisted of just screwing around with the minds of patients. He didn`t like it, doing a Dostoevsky. His consciousness rebelled and he switched over to another job. Any remarks of yours on the above?

​@peter ivankovich I quite enjoyed your comments. I have not read Dostoyevsky myself. But I have also never been convinced that there is any reason to read his works. I have listened to people describe his work in an effort to sell it as "genius" or "required reading", but I've never found any substance in these sales pitches. If the people who have supposedly benefitted from reading his books cannot describe precisely what it is they gained, I see no reason to follow their example. Life is short and time is precious.

I’m so glad he doesn’t put music in the video it would be so distracting

yah i too have Bach or Mozart going when i read...

Exactly

Schopenhauer was definitely a genius. His metaphysical system is by far the one which I find most plausible. I think it’s the culmination of monistic thinking. He brings together Plato, Kant and Advaita Vedanta in to a beautiful crafted synthesis.

Not pure discipline if you are dilly dallying on youtube.

you WANT to live your life playing saxophone. this is a desire.

All the best. Im doing the same but with attempting to realise the non existence of my individuality.

I, too, have staked my life on Schopenhauer being correct. But my project involves giving my life away to _finding and destroying your saxophone._ 🚫🎷🚫

@Baron Munchausen selective destruction

Thanks for this brilliant reply. It was a joy to read. I also have a couple episodes dealing with Nietzsche’s take on Schopenhauer and the differences between them, mainly from the Nietzschean perspective: vnclip.net/video/eHJGuzmEcqU/video.html
In the podcast feed, it’s two episodes (sort of like this video), but they’re combined into one video for VNclip

Everyday when he wakes up

Can you explain what his mother mean to that?

Yes, great book. I have almost all of kastrups books, a fine philosopher indeed. I love Schopenhauer.

I have the highest regard for Bernardo Kastrup. I regard him as being the Galileo of Consciousness. I think that , like Schopenhauer , he will became more significant over time .
He gives very profound scientific evidence for metaphysical Idealism and Advaita Vedanta.

Thanks!

​@Michael Dillon I find it annoying when people say they have "scientific evidence" for metaphysical claims. Either they don't understand what it is that science does, they don't understand what metaphysics is about, or both.

@saintsword23 What was the most recent Nobel Prize for Physics awarded for ?

2:34:20 This too

Thanks for commenting.

Why do you prefer Hegel?

@Kyle Fosnaugh Hegel's work is basically an argument for teleology, aka hope, optimis, god, a final goal. While Schop says there is nothing, we are going nowhere. I would ad , at best we might go in circles/cycles. So, someone preferring Hegel is 100% an indication of how they prefer to view the world, not how the world is.

absolutely true , i’m agree with you . There’s too much toxic positivity today and denial about fatalities and people struggling for something and Schopenhauer is one of those who helped me a lot in life by reading is work

I've seen so many lecturers in the history of philosophy present Schopenhauer as this horrendous, pessimistic, spiteful, depression-inducing philosopher that should be consigned to the dustbin. It's as annoying as Nietzsche being presented as a nihilist when his entire philosophy was literally about resisting nihilism.

@saintsword23 exactly, and i’m absolutely agree with you for Nietzsche , he prevented us for the upcoming general nihilism in our society and the last man

Thanks! Someone else caught the 1918 slip-up as well. Unfortunately its a mistake etched in the ether for all time!
Thanks for the insight on the monetary conversion, also!

@essentialsalts You're welcome!
This topic always gets my attention, since the founding of the FED (same as every central bank, which is written down in the communist manifesto from Marx) and then getting rid of the gold-standard is the biggest fraud in human history!
I looked it up, 60 Gulden (1840) would be around 1430€ today

@essentialsalts Did Schopenhauer help the soldiers to beat down the socialist revolution? This makes him more likeable for me :'D

I agree, re: Christianity, but Schopenhauer doesn’t actually believe all suffering disappears when you die. He believes in some version of palingenesis, in which the self which we represent is only a manifestation of the will, and thus, while representations come and go, the will endures.

@essentialsalts kind of like brahma(pure being) in Hindu philosophy. Existence itself.

He look beyond...schopenhaeur JAUHHHHH...he s the greatessss...

And for a long time

Unfortunately, Nietzsche was born with a congenital disease that plagued him throughout his life. He had migraines from the time he was 12 until the end of his life, coupled with vomiting, nauseau and near blindness as the condition worsened. Eventually, he collapsed from a severe series of strokes. An alternative theory is a brain tumor, which would have effectively lobotomized him.
So, while it would be unfounded to attribute his philosophy as the cause of his loss of sanity - we might notice, on the other hand, that Nietzsche more than anyone would be predisposed to agree with Schopenhauer that life is characterized by ever worsening suffering. And yet, he still remained firm in his view that life was of the highest value. And what could be more severe of a belief than the idea that one’s life of intense pain, vomiting and incipient insanity must be lived over and over again, for eternity?

Thank you for listening

Me too, the way you explain.

So what routine you follow Sir?

That's what pessimists always say! ;)

Only because realistic thinking is seen as negative 🙂

Lio s Nietzsche didn't consider himself an optimist. He calls himself a "pessimist of strength". He believed in asserting an honest view of the world, as Schopenhauer did - that to be life-affirming is to affirm pain, tragedy, calamity, torture, privation, and failure - and yet, to affirm it in spite of this. This is the Nietzschean "tragic worldview"; the love of fate and the love of life in spite of the suffering entailed - even *because* of the suffering entailed.

I have multiple sclerosis and your channel has been so helpful

Many thing schopenhaeur be misunderstood by others..
They didnt have a same vision with him..

Correct

You're very welcome!

Listen to studies in pessimism. It can give us an opportunity to sympathize with fellow sufferers, instead of being eachothers wardens. And attachment and desire leads to suffering.

And without chicken there would be no chicken wings.

@Native American Cowboy I think before kant there was advaita vendanta, buddha, so may be shoepenauer would still get it

Correct, and also kfc

Good luck

www.patreon.com/untimelyreflections
Thank you!

""A denial. A denial. A denial. A debial." - Kurt Cobain" - Chuck

​@1 Damn your house of mirrors! 😂

@1 hahhahahahahhaa

Phenomena / noumena
plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/

@essentialsalts Thank you very much! 🙏🏻

The first perhaps

The final line of the book is literally that the entire world is regarded as nothingness by the person who fully realizes Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

@essentialsalts I still think saying he 'rejects the world' is a complete mischaracterization of his (and, on some level, Kantian) metaphysics. He says the will is the world and once (a very buddhist concept) one extinguishes the will than the world disappears since the world is just a objectification of will. Saying Schoenhauer is an idealist (like Kant) is much more clear and accurate than saying "he rejects the world" - which is vague and unhelpful out of context. My two cents.

@Christopher Kovel
> He says the will is the world and once (a very buddhist concept) one extinguishes the will than the world disappears since the world is just a objectification of will.
And he advocates for this, because denying the will-to-live is the central ideal of his moral philosophy, which has the metaphysical implications that you admit here. That is *rejecting the world*, whether you like that phrasing or not.
This is sort of like saying, "You shouldn't say that 'lightning strikes', you should say 'air acts as an insulator between the positive and negative charges between the cloud and the ground and when the differences in charges becomes too great, this insulating capacity of the air breaks down and there is a rapid discharge of electricity'." Sorry man, that doesn't fit in a video title.

His moral philosophy (again, like a buddhist) then denies both the will AND the world, does it not? I hope you see my problem with how you focus on the world. You also mentions he denies life. Again, taking his main work holistically, I really didn't get that impression. Of course, his main work is dense and complex but I would not claim that a central theme of his philosophy is how he 'denies life'.

Yeh, back in the day, one could buy a flat for that money, a farm and couple of sheeps

Did I say that? Must have misspoke. It should be 1819.

@essentialsalts yeah, bro. But then, thanks. Nobody is perfect

I doubt it

😂

He was writing at a time when it was more common for philosophers to define things metaphysical terms rather than physical. He does define gravity and other physical laws as properties of phenomenal objects throughout the work. In other words, he says gravity is a property of objects with mass. You're right it's not a complete view given the modern information (he doesn't talk about the gravitational field), but as a provisional definition from someone writing in the 1810s, it's not bad, wouldn't you say?

1819

@Palawan jungle days yeah, I already knew that... but thanks

Much of Schopenhauer's personal musings on the talk and work of men in his company was as resolutely negative as his diatribes on women. He had fewer negative things to say about men, but spoke more on women, which makes me think that he is dismissive of other men but seriously focused on women. Cavalry Officers, inn keeps, Junker-noblemen and Princes all pissed Schopenhauer off in equal measure. I don't buy your theory.

And here I was, thinking that I’d fooled people into believing that I ad libbed a three hour lecture on a complex philosophical topic! 😂

Me!

Bro got triggered by biographical tidbits lmao wut

@essentialsalts gossip and hearsay as usual in bios, unproven crap/pap . Make up crudup . Not RELEVANT.

@wryitBerp Take a chill pill.

I was there when it happened. It's not gossip, it's an accurate description of events that took place at this time in history