In Our Time - Schopenhauer

Episode Date: October 29, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests AC Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile and Christopher Janaway discuss the dark, pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.As a radical young thinker in Germany in the early 19th century, Schopenhauer railed against the dominant ideas of the day. He dismissed the pre-eminent German philosopher Georg Hegel as a pompous charlatan, and turned instead to the Enlightenment thinking of Immanuel Kant for inspiration. Schopenhauer's central idea was that everything in the world was driven by the Will - broadly, the ceaseless desire to live. But this, he argued, left us swinging pointlessly between suffering and boredom. The only escape from the tyranny of the Will was to be found in art, and particularly in music. Schopenhauer was influenced by Eastern philosophy, and in turn his own work had an impact well beyond the philosophical tradition in the West, helping to shape the work of artists and writers from Richard Wagner to Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus to Sigmund Freud.AC Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Beatrice Han-Pile is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex; Christopher Janaway is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Zanzig in Eastern Germany in 1788. As a young man, he wasn't lacking in confidence. He argued with the great novelist Goethegel, the predominant philosopher of the day.

His central idea was that everything in the world is fundamentally united by a will to live. Its two key features are that it is infinite and meaningless and leads to boredom or suffering. The only escape from this Yagud comes through self-denial or art, pre-eminently, music. This pessimistic worldview carried Schopenhauer's influence well beyond philosophy.

His thinking marks the music of Richard Wagner and finds echoes in the work of Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hardy and Albert Camus. To discuss the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, I'm joined by Anthony Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London. Beatrice Han Pyle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex and Christopher Janoway, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. Anthony Grayling, Schopenhauer came of age in early 19th century Germany.

At that time, a dominant philosopher in Germany was Hegel. Before we come to Schopenhauer, can you give us a sense of Hegel and his hegemony of philosophy at the time? Well, it's very interesting. When Schopenhauer was a young student, in fact, Hagell hadn't yet made a reputation, but he did very soon after Schopenhauer had begun his own work in philosophy. This was around about 1820, I suppose, by which time Hagell was the professor of philosophy at Berlin, the most prestigious philosophy appointment in Germany at the time. And he drew enormous audiences to his lectures, and his works, which he had published in the preceding decade,

began to have a great influence on thought in Germany. The thing about Hagle is that he had this tremendous system, a great, sort of totalising system, which purported to explain the unfolding of the world spirit through time. And critics of Hegel have suggested that what he had in mind was that the Prussian state and German culture of the first half of the 19th century was pretty near the summit of the unfolding of the world spirit. This is something at Schopenhauer very much disagreed with. Can you give us a rather more detail of Hegel's system of how the world spirit unfolded it is? This idea is that at every moment, as it were, in the history of the world spirit, there are internal contradictions to the state of the spirit at that time, or the state indeed of anything at that time.

And these internal contradictions have to be overcome by a forging of a new and higher version of itself, as it were. This is sometimes put not entirely accurately in terms of a thesis and an emerging new synthesis out of it. In fact, Hegel didn't quite put it that way himself because he thought of these contradictions as being implicit or internal to a given state of things. So the idea is a dialectic, a movement forward into time with, as it were, an increasing value or an increasing level of perfection, moving always towards this final perfection,

which is the full realization of the spirit and history. Is he talking about the way ideas move through time or the way actions lead to ideas that move through time? time. Well, he applied this analysis to everything, but the great point of it was this idea of what he called the geist, which is the true meaning of

things. We translate that as a spirit, that it's that, it's the fulfillment of that ultimately. But everything can be thought of in this dialectic way, even particular things, can be thought of as being in a state of inner contradiction and needing this resolution by moving forward to a higher plane.

So of Hegel's philosophy and the power of of the professor in German thought, which was massively powerful, and Schopenhauer was never going to be anywhere near reaching that state. But there's also at that time there's a burgeoning romantic movement, which is anti-enlightenment. Can you briefly tell us about that and how that played into the atmosphere or the thought of the time?

Yes, the romantic movement, especially in Germany at the end of the 18th century, has to figure it's one of the major, I suppose, counter-enlightenment movements, because one of its premises was that reason by itself cannot be and shouldn't be, as the dominating note in thinking about things,

but that there are other sources of authority over us, as it might be beauty or nature or tradition or sentiment or even indeed the blood of the people. And in different ways this expressed itself in poetry, in writing, in music, but also, of course, in philosophy. Now, I don't think anybody would willingly be without the poetry and the music that came out of romanticism. but Schopenhauer in particular tremendously disliked some of the romantic impulses in the philosophy of the day.

So he heard lectures by people like Fichter and Schelling, and he was very, of course, aware of what Hegel was doing. And he tended a little, I think, to lump them altogether, perhaps not entirely fairly, as something which really required opposition because he felt it was moving philosophy in particular in the wrong direction. Christianiway, can you tell us about Chopin Howe, his family he was born into how he became a young aspiring philosopher in his late teens, early 20s? Yes, well, he was born into a middle-class family. His father was quite a successful merchant in Dancy, which is a free-trading city, and now Gdansk, of course, in Poland. and his mother was actually a very successful literary figure in her own right later in life

and there was a bit of a mismatch between his parents which I think he later came to realize he was destined for a career in business in trade in fact it said that his name Arthur or Artur was selected because it was a kind of pan-European name which would fit him for this role as a European businessman man. His father died when he was about 17, and it's thought that it was probably by suicide. His father was ill and had a tendency to be rather depressed and melancholy, which in fact was a tendency that Artur himself seems to have inherited. But this result of his father dying meant that over the next few years when he became of age, he was free to do what he wanted, and he entirely gave up. the commercial career that he'd been destined for. Didn't he inherit enough money to make him rather independent? He did. When he came, I think when he became 21, he had quite a large fortune that he inherited.

His mother just let him have it and said, it was quite liberal-minded actually, and said, well, you choose what you want to do in life. He decided he wanted the scholarly life, enrolled at the University of Göttingen, and then later moved on to Berlin, as Anthony said. so he really just gave up his father's influence and I think it's been said that had his father not died early on

he might never have gone into philosophy because his father was quite an influential figure over him one thing we didn't get around to when Anthony was giving us that background was the power of the professor and the professorships in Germany at that time and they were in extremely powerful not only intellectual positions but social positions and Bishop and Hauer would aspire to that

and there was Hagle both a professor and the great philosopher. Can you tell us why he attacked Hegel so violently and what he said against him? Right. Well, I think the chief word that he tends to use when writing about Hegel is that of Charlottan. Anybody who's read Hegel or tried to read Hegel even would find that it's quite a difficult read. There's quite a lot of heavy terminology and a sense of a certain amount of obscurity in his writing. Schopenhauer thought that all of this was a bit of a bombastic kind of smoke screen for some rather empty thought on the one hand. He also thought that Hegel's idea that by reason we could reach some knowledge of the absolute and that there was this perfection

that everything was striving for, he found these notions really rather ridiculous. Also, his thought was very ahistorical, Schopenhauer, non-historical, that's to say. He didn't think that the essence of human beings or of the world ever really changed. So Hegel's idea that everything is progressing towards perfection through history was something completely anathema to Schopenhauer. So what happened to really inflame his hostility to Hegel was that Schopenhauer, as a very young lecturer, put on his lectures at the same time as Hegel's.

Hagell, as Anthony has said, was the star of the academic establishment, had this professorship at Berlin, had 200 people in his lectures. Schopenhauer had about five, I think, and it sort of petered out, and he basically never returned after one semester of teaching, never returned to his academic career. Of course, he was unable to do that because he had this private income. But throughout his life, he was then very contemptuous towards what he called university professors, people who made a career. out of doing philosophy. He thought you should be independent-minded and not sort of coutout of the establishment. Did his attack on Hegel have any effect on Hegel's reputation?

I don't think it really did, not at that stage, because Schopenhauer himself wasn't really read much until about the 1850s. I mean, there were a couple of reviews of his books earlier on, but he didn't really have an audience until the last decade of his life. He died in 1860, and only just then did he start to become recognized as a philosopher.

By which time I think it's true to say that Hegel's hegemony, his influence, was waning already. And Beatrice Anparal, so Schopenhauer turned against Hegel. And one of the people who went back to is Kant. He was also influenced by Plato. But let's stick with Kant at the moment. What did he find in Kant that was attractive? Well, he particularly liked Kant, his epistemology, his theory of knowledge. And the distinction that Kant introduced between, on the one hand, the phenomenal world and the numeral.

world on the other. So the phenomenal world is the world as we perceive it through time, space, and as organized by the law of causality. And phenomena are all the things that are in it. So Melvin, you're a phenomenon. I'm a phenomenon as well. So to take an example, I'm sitting on a chair. I'll perceive that in space as an extended object, in time, as something that is here now, and as part of a network of causes and effects. For example, I'm sitting on it because I moved it. So the phenomenal world is really the world as it is dependent on a set of perceptual conditions, time and space, and conceptual conditions, the law of causality. That's really Schopenhouse version of count, because in count it's slightly different, but the main distinction is the same. So the question arises of what would happen if these conditions were bracketed.

And one way to think about this is to imagine time, space and causality as a pair of glasses, so to speak, that would be heart-wide on us. So everything we see, we have to see as mediated through time, space, and causality. And the question is, what would happen if these glasses were somehow removed? Would it be the case that there would be nothing, that everything would disappear? Now, Schopenhauer follows Kant in saying that, no, this would not happen. What we would have is the world, as it is in itself, independently from perceptual and conceptual conditions. That's what he calls the numeral world, but just in the same way as without the glasses, we wouldn't be able to see the phenomenal world. In the same way, we cannot know anything about the numeral world. We can say that it exists, but no knowledge of it is possible. The numeral world is things like, is there a god, does God exist, things that cannot be proved? Yes, well, it's rather, it's, these. are questions, that's one,

metaphysical questions that could be answered if we knew about the essence of things, and in particular, indeed, whether there is a god, whether we have a soul, whether the world has an end, that sort of thing. But the idea for Kant, and that's where Schopenh actually

differs from it, but the idea for count, is that these questions are unanswerable because there's no empirical basis on which we could form appropriate knowledge, which would give us answers. The Chob and I challenged that. That was his discreet with Canada.

On what grounds did he challenge it? How could we know about the unknowable as far as he was concerned? Right, okay. What ground, I think it's because he thinks that although Kant secures the possibility of empirical knowledge, in particular through the sciences, that leaves out exactly the sort of questions that we were talking about. And these to him are the most important ones. You know, what's the essence of the world? Why is their suffering?

What's the meaning of human life? So he tried very hard to bypassed. what's often called the Kantian prohibition, the impossibility of knowing being itself. And he found a rather intriguing way, which starts with the observation that our bodies are very ambiguous objects. On the one hand, they are phenomena,

empirical objects like everything else. So if I look at my hand, I see it as extended in space. I could calculate its position compared to the table, compared to a microphone, and so forth. There's nothing different, with say the microphone itself.

And that's representational knowledge. On the other hand, I also have, he says, this inner access to my body. So I know where my hand is in space without any calculation. I know what it feels to have a hand, as opposed to having a foot, for example. I know whether I'm in pain or not.

So Schopenhauer thinks that this inner access, so to speak, to the body is a form of non-representational knowledge, which therefore can bypass the Kantian prohibition. And it works, he says, as an access to the citadel of the in itself. And if I focus on this intuitive access to my body, then what I discover, he thinks, is that I'm nothing but a set of desires and drives.

And these desires and drives, he calls the will. And then in book two of his major opus, the world is will and representation, he proceeds to extend this insight to the whole world. So not just our bodies, not just us, but everything in the phenomenal world is what he calls an objectification of the will. And he has, so for animals, for example,

they like us have desires, they want to live fundamentally, plants try to grow, and he even comes up with interesting examples like crystals, which are for him halfway between the mineral and the vegetal world, and which also show an aspiration to grow. So he comes to this conclusion,

anti-Cantian conclusion, that it is possible to know the inn in the numinal world, although not through a presentation of knowledge, and its name, its essence, is Will. That was terrific. I want to go back a bit now, sure.

Just to say that, that's wonderful covering the course. But Anthony Grayling, so we still, he's with a canteen idea, He's challenging that part of the Catan idea, as Beatrice has outlined so very lucidly. But let's just go back to his first serious work was called the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Is that an important work to start with? It was his first real republic.

What's important about it as far as Schopenhousen-Haw's concerned? It was his doctoral dissertation and his first publication. In fact, self-published. Yes, the fourfold route of the principle of sufficient reason, it was called. It was a magnificent title. And it was an examination, really, of the idea. that causality, the concept of causality, and the idea that everything that is

has to have been produced by some antecedent set of conditions have very important implications for his later thought. The idea is that anything which is the case has been produced by a set of conditions which is sufficient for making it the case, and that therefore the thing thus produced follows from its ground by necessity. This turned out to be very important later on because in a very sophisticated analysis of the notion of free will,

which perhaps we'll come on to later on, it provided him with his reason for thinking that all individual actions are causally necessitated, have to be, even though that left room for an idea of overall responsibility premised on our character. But the examination of the idea of grounds and of the relation of grounds to what follows from them, the idea of the sufficient and necessary conditions

which would have to be invoked in an explanation of anything that is produced. That's the subject of that dissertation. Chris O'January, let's now come to his great work, and early great work is as often case with, well, no mind, which Beatrice was talking about, the idea of the will, can you take us on from where Beatrice took us to take that a bit further and emphasise what it is,

so our listeners know exactly what we can be talking about for the rest of the programme. Okay, well, Schopenhauer suggests that, or very strongly, argues, that the essence of everything is will. And I think probably the nearest we can get to this is the idea that everything is in some way striving or trying or tending in a direction.

The difficulty with this notion is that he thinks that for the most part, this is a blind striving. So nature is not conscious. It doesn't have desires in the literal sense that human beings do with their conscious minds. However, he thinks that everything in nature is of one kind, in the sense that everything is in some way striving to be something. And indeed, even in human beings, a lot of the will is unconscious.

Or it's the way that our body functions to fulfill needs. and interests that we have. We're not consciously making our heartbeat or digesting things and so on. But he sees all this as a way of striving, a way of the will trying to keep itself alive. He also thinks that reproduction is part of this. And indeed, the expression, which is often translated as will to life, is very crucial to his philosophy. It's not just the will to live, as it could also be translated.

also the will to produce life. So he actually sees that one of our, the primary drive of human beings is not only to survive, but to reproduce themselves. And he gives a great importance to sexuality under the heading of reproduction. And he thinks that the very important thing for human beings is that this is our essence.

Our essence is really not rationality. Rationality distinguishes us from other animals. But it just makes us cleverer at attaining the things we strive for. But it's the striving, the neediness that really is our essence, is really what is impelling us along. And there's a big switch here from earlier philosophy, particularly enlightenment philosophy, that sees reason as somehow the essence of human beings.

He's very much against that idea. And Beatrice Sampal, can we take this even further and push into this? As I understand it, he tells us this will, is both infinite and meaningless. If that's right, can you tell us why he thinks that? Yes, well, there's really two things. The first is that he doesn't believe in satisfaction of desire. He thinks that at best a desire may be satisfied for a short time,

but then what will happen is that immediately another desire will emerge. So the thought is that this driving that Chris was talking about is infinite. it, there's no end point which we could reach, and that's probably another of his lines of opposition with Hegel, there's no progress, there's no end point that we could reach where we could rest, so to speak, and desire would be satisfied. In fact, he does mention cases which could look like that, so when we are satisfied and we stay satisfied for a while, but then what happens, he thinks, is boredom, and the satisfaction of desire, it's becomes painful, so to speak. And he has this great formula saying that life oscillates like

a pendulum between desire and boredom, which each in their way are painful. So it's this endless character of desire, which also makes it meaningless, because whatever we achieve, there is the sense that this is just a drop of water in the sea of desire, so to speak. There's no end state, no ultimate goal for the will. It is just endlessly, blindly, as Chris said, striving. And the best it can hope for, so to speak, is to become aware of itself in

its higher phenomena, namely human beings. But I guess we'll get back to that. Well, I think we're going to try to get somewhere here that now with Anthony Grayling. Can you tell us how he was, I mentioned it and we went whiz past it. We didn't stop at that post of Plato. But you talked bit about Kant, but another big influence on him remarkably for the time, and perhaps even uniquely, for a Western philosopher, were the Upanishads.

And he brought oriental thought, I might say as much of philosophy. How did the Buddhism and the Hindu pedantic philosophy play into what he was trying, what he was saying about the will,

Anthony? It's first necessary just to remark that understanding of Indian philosophy in the early 19th century was still in a nascent state, it was still just emerging, which is why when people talk about Schopenhauer and his interest in that, they tend to run together two separable things, although they do have connections, that is between Vedanta, which is associated with Upanishads and the tradition of what you might or later came to be called Hindu thought, on the one hand, in Buddhism on the

other, which is a separate thing, although it does have great commonalities with the early and middle Upanishads. that the key similarity between Schopenhauer's thought and Indian thought is with Buddhism, with the idea that striving, yearning, restlessness is a cause of suffering and that therefore the character of the world, the character of experience in the world, is suffering. And that the only way that one can escape suffering, according to the Buddhist tradition, is to cease to will, to cease to strive and to yearn and to desire. and this denial of the will, this refusal to be driven on into suffering by the will,

is the source, the route of escape. And Schopenhauer very much agrees with that. Now, he arrived at this view independently, I think. I think when he was doing his early work and beginning work in his 20s on the world as will and representation, he wasn't that aware. But when he did become aware of those Upanishads, which are the texts of the Vedantra tradition, he immediately recognized a similarity of thought

and sort of embraced it, claimed that he read one or two of the verses of the Upanishads every night for the rest of his life. Yes, he did indeed. It actually was quite early. He was given a copy of a rather strange Latin translation of the Upanishads when he was quite young, and he did almost become like a Bible for him.

So he had early knowledge of the Upanishads while he was writing the world as well. I only found out about Buddhism later, and then was very pleased to find that there was a convergence. Just can we develop this on? Can you give, listen, some idea of what more specifically he's taking from the Upanishads and how it's matching in with his views that he's taken from Kant and so on. Are these spliced together or does one grow out of the other?

I don't know what, I don't think they are spliced together, yes. I guess the main idea is really the one that Anthony was explaining, namely the thought that there's no sin satisfaction is not a durable satisfaction and cessation of pain is not really possible. The only way out for us, so to speak, is and for the will itself, is self-denial renunciation. That's certainly one aspect. There's another important aspect, I think, in his

ethical theory. Because one of the fundamental Buddhist ideas is that harming others is fundamentally harming oneself, and we should be aware of that. Now, in the fourth book of the as world and representation, Schopenhauer develops an idea

which is very similar. He says that when one thinks about the contrast between the essence of the world and the phenomenal world, what one finds is that although the world at its heart is just one, it's the will. At the phenomenal level, the level in which we live, the everyday level,

what we see is endless strife and war. And just by, in order to stay alive, we have to destroy things, we eat animals, we eat plants and so forth. And we all end up he thinks we have a sort of fundamental egotism which places us at the center of our universe. So, and that is, of course, severe cause of unhappiness and conflict. And the thought he takes from Buddhism is that through compassion, it is possible to realize that our essence is the same as that of all other phenomena,

and that therefore these phenomenal strifes which agitate the empirical world could be overcome if we identified with other beings and realized that in harming them, we harm each. show, no, we harm ourselves as well. Christopher Jen, does he think that recognising the will can teach us how to live, Schoferner? Is his aim to teach us how to live? Or his aim just to examine the world as it is?

That's what his aim is, and we take from it what we want to. Well, I think his aim is, indeed, to give us a reorient our description of the world and our sense of what we are. The very fundamental thing that Beatrice has touched on is the idea that somehow being an individual isn't ultimate. Being an individual is in some way you're under a bit of an illusion that you, the individual, matter any more than anything else.

And indeed, in some sense, the individual is illusory. If you go down to the level of what things are in themselves, beyond the phenomenal level, there are no individuals. I mean, his metaphysics suggests that the thing in itself can't be divided the world. The world as it is in itself, what its real essence is, can't be divided up into separate things at all. So there's a sense in which myself, the individual that I find myself as, isn't fundamental at all.

I think that's an important thing that he wants us to think. It's a very tough message in a way. So what is important? Can he elaborate that a bit? I mean, is he saying something like, well, he is also, and very early on, saying animals are just important, plants are just as important. He's saying that compared with, as it were,

what other people are saying at the time, very early on this, he's abolished all hierarchies completely. Yes, in terms of value, yes. As I said, I think before, that there's a big difference between ourselves and other animals in that we have reason. Reason enables us to make judgments, have logical arguments,

be motivated by thoughts about the future, thoughts about the past. Animals live in a continual present and are quite different from us in that way. but it doesn't make them, well, A, it doesn't make human beings any happier because as well as suffering from the present, we suffer from our anxieties about the future and our guilt and remorse about the past, which animals are free from.

Also, it doesn't make us ethically any more valuable. It makes us more liable to do harm because we're cleverer. You know, we can take great steps to elaborately harm other beings, which animals can't. and also we don't have any greater moral worth by virtue of being rational because the whole point about morality is it's about suffering, as Beatrice has said. Animals suffer because they will, they have desires, they have needs, those desires can be thwarted, and hence they suffer just as much as we do.

So ethically, we're on a par with other animals. And in fact, Schopenhauer certainly in his later works, he discovers quite a lot about societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, particularly in Britain. One thing about Britain that he's very, praises very much, is that it has this concern for animals. And in the early 19th century, there are beginning to be these societies to protect them.

And he thinks it's scandalous how animals are treated. He mentions vivisection and the use of animals to be beasts of burden and so on. And in this way, he seems to be actually very contemporary with us, his concern for animal welfare. Anthony, can we get back to this idea of what is unknowable, the numinal, and why Schopenhauer thought that there were ways to know the unknowable. Can we talk about it in terms of sexual desire, for instance, which he, as Christopher said early on in the programme,

was a big part of what he wrote, and how the appetites might take us there. Can you just get that? I don't think we've talked about it enough. I don't think of people listening, let's talk about me. And I've got a clear enough of what the numinal is and how it is he pulled.

it into a possible area of knowledge. Chris reminded me just before the programme, as it happens, that Schopenhauer himself didn't like the word numinal itself. He always used the expression, thing in itself. So, well, we'll stick to that one. The thing in itself. The thing in itself.

The idea here is that everything that appears to us in the phenomenal world, as Beatrice has described, is both something for us, because of the nature of our cognitive capacities of how we perceive and conceive it. But it is also something that has a nature in itself.

And in the Kantian philosophy, this is sealed off from us. All we can know about it is some negative things, namely that they don't obey the categories of thought that constitute the phenomenal world for us. But the key thing, again, as Beatrice told us earlier, is that we have access to this, to the thing in itself, through our own experience of willing. That there is some scholarly dispute here,

and Chris would be the experts on this, about whether what we actually get in touch with is the thing in itself will, through our experience of willing, or whether our own experience of willing brings us as close as it's possible for us to get to the ultimate metaphysical reality. But let's just take it that we get into direct contact with this underlying metaphysical reality of all things through our own experience of desiring, of yearning, of having these urgencies, one of which, of course, is indeed sexual desire, because a tremendous feature of the universe is this will to life, to continuation, not just, as Chris pointed out, to being alive or staying alive, but also to producing more life. One of the big influences, as it may be, even if it's indirect on Freud,

is the idea that this unconscious sexual drive is a powerful determinant of what we are and of our experience. But it is that, it's the fact that we feel our appetites, that we are driven by them, that it's very hard, it's hard work, as Chris pointed out earlier on, to do the work of self-denial, that is most direct palpable recognition of the underlying reality of things, the will. But is he actually saying that sexual desire and sexual consummation in themselves are a numinal experience

which then brings us back into an area where we can describe what is supposed to be unknowable? Well, the presence of any kind of desire and yearning, and sexual desire would be a particularly notable feature of it, is our experience of the thing in itself, which is this underlying metaphysical reality.

Sexual consummation is a quite different thing, and it would only ever be, at best, a temporary cessation of that appetite, because it would soon recur, depending upon how energetic one is. So it would be in part, a feature of this, of the sort of infinitude, of the limitlessness of the yearning, the striving, the willing that causes our experience of suffering. Chris.

There's a very important essay that he wrote in the second volume of the World's Will and Representation in 1844 on the metaphysics of sexual love, and it's a very, quite a well-read text. He suggests that we experience desire as an individual. for another individual. So it's on the phenomenal level that this all occurs. But we're under, again, we're under a kind of illusion

that really it's me, this individual, desiring this other individual. What's really happening underneath is that our essence, our nature, which is common to the rest of the world, is kind of driving us on. We're kind of pushed along by this striving, this will, which we're kind of at the mercy of.

We're imprisoned by it. Yes, we're imprisoned by, it, even if we try to shut it out and get on with our intellectual life, it always keeps intruding into our thoughts. I think there's a bit of a personal confession here that his sexual desires were very strong and we found it very hard to accommodate them to his intellectual persona, I think. But that's perhaps another story. But romantic love is a kind of illusion that disappears. He says as soon as we possess the individual we deserve. we realize that it's just any old sexual desire.

Yeah, just on this, he actually says that love is a trick of nature to ensure the reproduction of the species. So any, you know, higher, what we might thought of as higher feelings are just illusory. What the bottom line is, the species has to go on beyond the individuals and nature will do anything that ensures this, including generating feelings of love in these individuals. We've talked fleetingly about self-denial

or getting outside oneself using Oriental as a guide towards that but he also thought that one relief, one escape was art, particularly music. Can you tell us why he thought that music was a way to escape the swing

between pain and boredom? Well, music is an interesting case for Schopenhary, it's at the top of his hierarchy of the arts, and what makes it special is that it's the only art in which we have a direct attunement, if you like, to the essence of the world. And we can feel that in the way music moves us directly without the need for visual representations, without the need for words. The thought is that when we hear music, this sort of materializes the drives that are at work in the world.

And he actually then correlates the various... the bass, the treble and so forth to the great forces in the universe. So music is really the most immediate of all the arts, of all the arts, the one in which we can feel, so to speak, our numeral essence in the highest and most powerful way. And most outstandingly Wagner, read Chopinard massively were told, in the middle of the 19th century when he wasn't composing or composing very little indeed

and partly because of the privileging as you people say these days of music and took it into his music and tried to use the philosophy to help him write the music. Yes, so after the 1848 revolution which Wagner had taken part in

he was on the barricades, he ran away to Switzerland all his colleagues or the barricades had been put in prison and he spent a number of years thinking, rethinking really his approach to music and to opera. And it was what, and they began work on the ring. And he had written the libretto for the entire ring, had begun work on the music for the first two parts of the ring, when he encountered Schopenhauer. Now he, for the rest of his life, he read Schopenhauer,

he talked about Schopenhauer, discussed it with Cosma, you look at Cosimus' diaries, there's an enormous number of references to Schopenhauer in Wagner's speech. But the underlying ground note of all that is that what Wagner felt when he read Schopenhauer was that here was somebody who articulated what he himself had already felt. That is that music is the ultimate expression. When it expresses sorrow and joy and love and ecstasy, it's not the sorrow, joy, love ecstasy of a particular individual or a moment, but sorrow, joy, ecstasy itself, it's absolutely an expression of the metaphysical realities. And so there he was, right in the middle of writing the ring, hadn't really begun to write the music for at least the last

two parts of the ring, but he had to stop and write a different opera, Tristan and Duzolder, which is perhaps the best, purest expression of the application of those ideas that Wagner recognized and found a resonance in Chopinard to Wagner's own work. That is par excellence, if you like the Chopinin, opera that Wagner wrote. I just direct, sorry, Chris, can I just say, can you give us just a few more names whom he influenced deeply?

Because it seems to me, from the reading for this program, but his ideas did gather force and sweep through the late 19th and way into the 20th century with some strong figures taking him... That's right. Or taking him on. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the most obvious is Nietzsche,

who read Chopper now avidly in the way that Wagner did, and in fact shared this passion with Wagner, who he knew. But then Nietzsche came to see the resignationism and the self-denial and the illusiness of the individual as really a kind of intellectual illness

that Europe was suffering from. And I think, in my view, much of Nietzsche's philosophy is built around an opposition to these ideas, the idea of affirmation of life, of becoming properly the individual that you are rather than self-denial. So I think that's the most important influence.

We've mentioned Freud briefly. Freud himself said it was remarkable how his ideas had been prefigured by Schopenhauer. We've mentioned the prominence of sexual desire in Schopenhauer's account. Somehow the essence of the human being is a drive towards sexual intercourse. That was very echoed by Freud.

But also, Schopenhauer has an interesting prefiguring of Freud's notion of repression and he thinks that there's a kind of madness in which painful memories get eradicated by the mind and some elusive content is replaced with it. Freud recognized that as a prefiguring of his own idea of repression. Beatrice, the other, he influenced quite a number of writers,

Higabhardy and Lawrence and Camus, and they seem to have taken him on board quite strongly. So did he, in that sense, you think of somebody who really did prefigure what was going to happen in the following, or did they take him up and which way did it work? Well, let's take the example of Camus, and in particular what Camus said about the absurd. he read philosophy and he took two ideas from Schopenhauer. One is that ultimately life is meaningless

and the other is that we're doomed to suffer and he put that in what he called the paradox of the absurd namely on the one hand we're bound to look for meaning in our lives that's just what we do and on the other hand if we take a cold, hard look at the universe then we see

it's there's no ultimate meaning there. I'm sorry, it's my fault. I'm completely messed up at the timing. Thank you, Mr. Ruth Hart, Anthony Grayling, Christopher Jennerway. Next week, what is it? Siege of Monster. Thanks for listening.

If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, why not try others such as start the week, the Radio 4 discussion program where Andrew Maher sets the cultural agenda for the next seven days. To find out more, visit BBC.com.uk. Ford slash podcasts.