 Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Donzik on February 22nd, 1788. We know him today as the philosopher of pessimism, but I think we should, prior to exploring his philosophy, discover what possesses a man to adopt such a worldview. It began late in the 18th century after the Napoleonic and the Count Napoleonic campaigns had left scars of ravage on the face of the European continent, and moreover, in the minds of the European people. Schopenhauer, while traveling across this myriad of misery, took in the scenery and apparently never released it. His father would die by his own hand, after which he would move to Weimar with his mother. This move put the nail in his pessimistic coffin as he would develop a rather unhealthy relationship with her, ultimately culminating in an incident wherein she pushed our philosopher down the stairs. Is it at all a surprise that he developed such a melancholic philosophy? After all, a man who has not known a mother's love, and moreover, has known her hatred, is certainly doomed to pessimism. Early on in his philosophic career, Schopenhauer would compose his famous color theory and to work on the idea's efficient reason, but the work which would lift him to the forefront of the early 19th century is the world as will and idea, published in 1819. In this work, Schopenhauer was so sure that he had solved the cardinal problems of philosophy that he considered having a signet ring engraved with his finks, throwing herself down the abyss, as she had promised to do upon having her riddles answered. Let us press on then and see for ourselves the masterpiece which Schopenhauer himself would label clearly intelligible, vigorous, and not without beauty. Since I will be attempting to summarize this work, I will stitch it together point by point in order to make it clear and comprehensible. He would begin by accepting the Kantian position that the world in which we live and of which we perceive is known to us only through our sensations and ideas. On the other hand, he would reject and refute the materialism propounded so forcefully by Hobbes and Hume. We can never arrive at the real nature of things from without, however much we may investigate, we can never reach anything but images and names. To have any chance at uncovering the ultimate nature of things without, we must begin within. So let us look to the mind, to the will. The will as Schopenhauer defined it is the unchangeable underlying force by which the conscious intellect is driven forth. It is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see. It is a will to live and a will to live well. Men are only apparently drawn from in front, in reality they are pushed from behind. This is to say that we think we are predominantly influenced by what we see when in reality it is by what we feel. The will is to our consciousness what the keystone is to a great arch. It holds together all its ideas and thoughts, accompanying them like a continuous harmony. The consciousness is not the only product of the will, according to Schopenhauer our bodies also forge themselves in the will's eternal fire. The whole body is nothing but objectified will. Death, throat and vows are objectified hunger. The organs of generation are objectified sexual desire. Unlike the intellect the will does not fatigue, it works continuously even in sleep, which Schopenhauer believed to be the original state of all life forms. If we begin at the bottom with protozoa and work our way up the Jacob's letter of consciousness to man we see the unconsciousness of plants from which it started still remains the foundation and may be traced in the necessity for sleep. Sleep is a morsel of death borrowed to keep up and renew that part of life which has been exhausted by the day. The will precedes even the intellect, we see this in the instinct of animals. An example given by Schopenhauer is when orangutans warm themselves by a fire which they find. They do not feed or stoke the fire because this is not the result of intellect, but of will. This will to live conquers even death. How might you ask? Well by the supercilious task of reproduction. He believes this to be every organism's ultimate goal, the denouement of our entire existence. It is the cause of war and the end of peace, the basis of what is serious and the aim of the jest, the inexhaustible source of wit, the key of all illusions and the meaning of all mysterious hints. The seeking of a mate is also largely out of the individual's control. We seek that which neutralizes our own defects and vice versa. Love is but an illusion cast on us by the species for the attainment of its end. The sexual impulse is to be regarded as the inner life of the tree upon which the life of the individual grows, like a leaf that is nourished by the tree and assists in nourishing the tree. This is why that impulse is so strong and springs forth from the depths of our nature. The individual dies out but the species lives on and with it comes the insatiable will. We prefer to believe that we are the culmination of events that all time has occurred for the sake of our own existence, but to our dismay we would be wrong in this assumption for it is only the self-same unchangeable being that is before us. Which today pursues the same ends as it did yesterday and ever will. Our will is only free as far as there is no other will to compare it to. Our actions, our decisions, our desires are subject to necessity. So in short we must play the part which we have undertaken to the very end. Now we come to the topics which would bestow upon our philosopher that well deserved title, the philosopher of pessimism. Something you will find in Schopenhauer's text regarding this subject is something reminiscent of those great eastern sages of antiquity. You see, like those profound eastern minds he thought suffering finds its roots in desire, and since desire is rooted in the eternal will, human suffering must also remain eternal. Unlike the East, Schopenhauer held the belief that the number of desires fulfilled or the number of desires extinguished is of no consequence, if a great impressing care is lifted from our breast, another immediately replaces it. The whole material of which was already there before but could not come into consciousness as care because there was no capacity left for it. But now that there is room for this, it comes forward and occupies the throne. Let us indulge our optimistic friends and concede to the claim that the elimination of desire and therefore strife was for a moment possible. In this case, Schopenhauer bitterly informs us boredom would become as intolerable of suffering and therefore must be quelled by strife. He also informs us that if we should bring clearly to a man's sight the terrible sufferings and miseries to which his life is constantly exposed, he would be seized with horror. And if we were to conduct the confirmed optimists through the hospitals and firmries and surgical operating rooms, through the prisons, torture chambers and slave kennels, over battlefields and places of execution, where it hides itself from the glance of cold curiosity, and finally allow him to look into the starving dungeons of Ubalino, he too would understand at last the nature of this best of all possible worlds. So how then would Schopenhauer have a subtane happiness? Is such a thing even possible in this worst of all possible worlds? It is through the requirement of wisdom and culture to the end of subordinating the will. The only way we as individuals can go about the subordination of the will is through the pursuit of knowledge. The more knowledge we obtain, the better we can examine ourselves. And the better we can examine ourselves, the better we can understand the passions that would eventually lead us down the path of suffering if gone unchecked. We should also adopt a determinist philosophy, which will allow us to see the necessity of all things. We need not go about this task alone, though. The great minds of the past will be there ready and willing to lend us a hand, for it is only for such loving minds that these great ones have lived. Once we reach this willless state or nirvana, if you will, we should find out ones that are suffering has been considerably diminished. Is this the end of it then? No. Schopenhauer informs us once again that the life of the individual is but only borrowed from the species. The will lives on. But can't the species acquire that which the individual has? I'm afraid not. For the species, the only option, Schopenhauer thought, is to end its perpetuation. But one obstacle yet stands in the way of this great mass extinction of the human race, this being that tenacious will to reproduce. If he headed his way, Schopenhauer would have us place the blame for this on women, and bitterly advises the men of this world to avoid them, whatever their cost. He makes his contempt for them no secret to his readers, what hatred of women one mishap had generated in this unfortunate soul. There can be no doubt that his philosophy, like any other, has its complications. But can we not say that it also has its profundities? He taught us that mere intellectual thinking was not enough, that action must follow thought if we were to make changes in our lives and in the species as a whole. There is also something refreshing here that our more metaphysical philosophers left wanting, that being the clearness of his style and the directness of his thought. Yes, we owe it to Schopenhauer that he revealed our secret hearts to us, showed us that our desires are the axioms of our philosophies and cleared the way to an understanding of thought as no mere abstract calculation of impersonal events, but as a flexible instrument of action and desire. If you enjoyed this video or found it helpful, consider subscribing to the channel. And as always, thank you for talking philosophy with me. Until next time.