Schopenhauer: Living Your Worst Life

Ray Briggs
Is life just endless suffering?

Josh Landy
Are we all just pinging about between pain and boredom?

Ray Briggs
Is there anything we can do to be less miserable?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at philosopher’s corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about Arthur Schopenhauer and living your worst life.

Josh Landy
You know, I’ve got a huge soft spot for Schopenhauer, he had all those fascinating thoughts about how much suffering there is in life and how it’d be better not to want anything in the first place.

Ray Briggs
He said that life has no genuine intrinsic worth, and that in our world, happiness is not even conceivable. Don’t you find that a little depressing?

Josh Landy
Well, maybe, but not necessarily wrong. I mean, look around you. Ray. People are suffering. People are fighting with each other, then they get sick, then they die. Isn’t that just the reality of existence?

Ray Briggs
Maybe, but it’s not the only reality. People are also having fun and being nice to each other. We have kittens, cupcakes, cures for cancer, you have to focus on the positive.

Josh Landy
I don’t know. Look, Schopenhauer doesn’t deny the existence of kittens or cupcakes. He knows that people are sometimes happy. He just thinks the quantity of suffering vastly outweighs the quantity of joy.

Ray Briggs
Well, how would he know? Maybe he was a miserable guy, but that doesn’t mean everyone else has to be.

Josh Landy
He actually had a great answer for that. So he said, basically, imagine a lion eating an antelope. The antelope is having a really bad day for the lion. It’s Just Lunch. That’s what life is like, mountains of suffering and molehills of joy.

Ray Briggs
That’s a great zinger and everything. But it’s not all lions eating antelopes. You can have a delicious vegan meal and no animals have to suffer for that, then you still get to enjoy your lunch.

Josh Landy
That’s fair enough for lunch, but think of all the other things you want on any given day.

Ray Briggs
Sure, I want lots of fun things. I want to go to a party and enjoy myself. I want to dress up and look pretty. I want to attract a beautiful partner. I want to buy a cool, new car that we drive off into the sunset together.

Josh Landy
Dream Henry Schopenhauer says you’re highly unlikely to get all of that, and in the meantime, wanting it is going to make you miserable, all that yearning, all those miserable first dates, all those cars we can’t afford.

Ray Briggs
Oh, but when I do drive off into the sunset with my one true love, it’ll all be worth it.

Josh Landy
Really. Are you really that sure? Schopenhauer would say yeah, okay, you sometimes get what you want, but when you do, you no longer really want it anymore.

Ray Briggs
No, you mean because your partner turns out to snore and your new car springs an oil leak.

Josh Landy
Even if that doesn’t happen, Chopin now thinks there are only two emotional states. There’s suffering and there’s boredom. So when you’re yearning for love, you suffer, and when you get it, you’re bored. You miss the chase you suffer from no longer having a desire to suffer from.

Ray Briggs
I don’t get it. Josh, you said I’m miserable waiting for my partner to come along, but now you’re saying I’ll miss the chase when it’s over, which must mean that I enjoy desiring things. So which is it?

Josh Landy
Well, maybe you do enjoy desiring things in a way, but just think about how much more blissful you’re going to be when you give up your attachment to your desires and your sense of self. Just stop thinking about yourself as a special, unique individual, and stop yearning for Porsches and partners and parties. Oh my if you do that, if you manage to give up that attachment. That yearning, you’re gonna find your frustration melting away, and you’re also gonna be kinder to other people. Ah, that’s all very

Ray Briggs
Buddhist of you, I guess. But I can be a non self when I’m dead. Thank you very much. I like my sense of self. I like my desires.

Josh Landy
Well, maybe our guest will change your mind. It’s David Bather Woods, author of a new book, “Arthur Schopenhauer: the life and thought of philosophy’s greatest pessimist.”

Ray Briggs
But first we sent our roving philosophical reporter, Mary Catherine O’Connor, to find the silver lining in Schopenhauer’s dismal view of the world. She files this report.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Arthur Schopenhauer was the quintessential pessimist—the original Debbie Downer. Just ask Stanford English professor Blakey Vermeule.

Blakey Vermeule
His world view was basically, look, it’s a very fallen world. Everything kind of sucks.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
But to be fair, as he saw it, everything did kind of suck.

Blakey Vermeule
He took this kind of grand tour of Europe when he was a young man, and he saw this famous kind of outdoor prison in France, the Bagne de Toulon. And he sort of took that as kind of a an image of what the world is like.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
The image was very bleak. And his takeaway was that life is suffering, and he believed that starts at birth.

The Song of Bernadette
Do you know what we mean when we speak of the original sin?

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Not exactly the stuff of self help books, but Vermeule says it can be a guiding principle.

Blakey Vermeule
We suffer for the sin of being born, and so therefore, like try to be a little kinder, because it sucks for other people, as well as for yourself. I’ve always found this idea very therapeutic.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Not that he always took his own advice. Early in his career, as he struggled to get a foothold in academia, Schopenhauer was living in a boarding house and got into a confrontation.

Blakey Vermeule
He was very sensitive to noise, so one morning he heard his neighbor talking outside his vestibule. He got mad. He left his room, and he got up and he picked his neighbor up and forcibly removed her from the vestibule. She immediately stumbled and fell down the stairs.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
She sued him and won. Schopenhauer was forced to pay her a stipend for the rest of her life.

Blakey Vermeule
She lived for another 20 years, and when she died, he wrote just this little line in his journal, which was in Latin. It’s “anus obit abit onus,” which means the old woman is dead, but also that the asshole is dead, the burden is lifted. So that’s our Schopenhauer. I mean, he’s probably a terrible human being, but extremely funny

Mary Catherine O’Connor
tT understand the unpleasant aspects of his demeanor, consider his early life.

Michael Sugrue
Arthur Schopenhauer family background has a lot to do with his psychic makeup and with the stance he takes towards the world, the sort of characteristic postures of his philosophy.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
That’s Michael Sugrue, a philosophy professor, in a lecture recorded in 1992 he passed away in 2024 Schopenhauer was born in 1788, to a wealthy Dutch family. His father was a successful merchant, but he died when Arthur was just 17. The family suspected it was suicide. Chagrew says schopenhauer’s mother was extremely cold and distant. She agreed to support his interest in academia on the condition that he leave home and stay gone. She actually called him an annoying know it all. His inheritance meant he had resources, but he was rootless.

Michael Sugrue
He is at sea in the social world. He has no familial contacts.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
He was not a social fellow. He once said, Were I a king, my prime command would be, leave me alone. He never married, and he spent his time going on walks, playing the flute, and reading widely, and developing his philosophy, which pulled from ancient traditions. Schopenhauer was one of the first European intellectuals to bring Eastern spiritual thought into his work.

Michael Sugrue
Schopenhauer has a powerful strain of Indian Eastern pessimism that I think is a combination of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
He observed the fleeting nature of pleasure, and so that humans are trapped in a cycle of seeking it only to lose it. Unlike pain, pleasure never lasts.

Blakey Vermeule
You never think, Oh, I’m my friend Blakey is experiencing chronic pleasure. I mean, you don’t like that’s not really a thing that we say about people.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
But in his interpretation of Eastern philosophy, Schopenhauer saw pain and suffering as something to just accept.

Blakey Vermeule
It’s a very old idea out of the ancient world that human lives are filled with pain, and actually the pain gets worse when we try to struggle against it or reject it.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
In other words, breathe through the pain, take pleasure where you can find it and get out of your own way.

Blakey Vermeule
He thought that the intellect was a big source of suffering, and once you try to kind of decenter the intellect and just accept that. That life is suffering, then you’re gonna be less miserable overall. And I think that’s actually true, or I found it to be true in my own life.

Annie Hall
I feel that life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable. Those are the two categories, you know. The horrible would be like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, cripples, I don’t know how they get through life, it’s amazing to me, you know, and the miserable is everyone else that’s that’s so when you go through life, you should be thankful that you’re miserable.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
For Philosophy Talk. I’m Mary Catherine O’Connor.

Josh Landy
Thank you so much, Mary-Catherine, for that inspiringly demoralizing report. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher, Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by David bather woods. He’s professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick and author of the forthcoming book “Arthur Schopenhauer: the life and thought of philosophy’s greatest pessimist.” David. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

David Bather Woods
Hi. It’s nice to be here.

Josh Landy
So David, you’ve been fascinated by Schopenhauer since you were a teenager. How did that happen?

David Bather Woods
It was my mum’s fault. She was a nurse, and then when she retired from practice, she got into academia, she taught nursing. And once you’re a chapter for a book, and she was paid in vouchers, as we often are, for more books, and she donated them to me because you knew I was getting into philosophy, and I basically searched different titles and different philosophers. I got Kant, I got Heidegger, I got Chomsky and Leibniz, but I got Schopenhauer and his essay on the basis of the freedom of the will, and it was, frankly, the only one that made any sense to me at all. It was a topic I’d been thinking about for a while, but he made such clarity of it and such there was such profound insights that I was I was hooked.

Ray Briggs
So David, you’ve described Schopenhauer as the world’s greatest pessimist. Was he really as pessimistic as Josh was making him sound the beginning of the show?

David Bather Woods
Yes, exactly as pessimistic. All those claims are things that Schopenhauer says, that life is a pendulum that swings between suffering and boredom, that it was better not to exist, that suffering is essential to all living beings, not just human beings, but animal life. Most of his arguments he could make just on the basis of animal life, not just human life. The one thing that people might say is not pessimistic is that there’s a place for salvation in his thinking. I have questions about whether that’s actually a form of optimism, but that’s the only thing that makes people sort of think there’s a lighter tone to Schopenhauer.

Ray Briggs
Does that make him a particularly good philosopher to discover when you’re a teenager?

David Bather Woods
Yeah. I mean, he’s in the lineage of the existentialists, the doom and gloom and the despair and the kind of what’s the point for people who like teenagers, who are often looking for a point in life, he’s a good challenge. If you can overcome Schopenhauer, you can overcome any existential despair.

Josh Landy
Yeah, maybe when you’re 15 and you’re sitting in your room feeling glum, as I certainly was, it’s kind of nice to have this feeling it’s not just me, it’s the structure of the world. This is just how life is. So tell us a bit more about why Schopenhauer thought everything is gloom and doom, right? I mean, there’s the fact that our desires make us suffer when we don’t get what we want. There’s the claim, at least on schopenhauer’s part, that when we do get the desires, we’re just bored. Are there other aspects to the picture, to why Schopenhauer thinks that existence is so terrible?

David Bather Woods
I mean, there’s a few. You’re right, that it’s about the structure of desire for him and the possibilities for happiness within those structures, which are very few, basically. And that’s why really talking about weighing up the happiness and suffering is actually too far downstream. He thinks there’s no point in weighing it up. It’s already decided because of the kinds of beings we are. The other thing actually, is that he had a lot of negative arguments against optimism. So there were a lot of arguments out there, particularly from Leibnitz and later thinkers for more optimistic worldviews, and he was very good at demolishing them. So he’s good at putting down his enemies and not just constructing his own defenses.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so I feel like there are two reasons you could think that things are bad. So you might just think it’s an accident that things are bad, like we got unlucky. But it doesn’t sound like that’s what Schopenhauer thinks. Schopenhauer seems to think it’s kind of essential, like, given that we are the kinds of beings we are, things could not possibly be good. We can’t even imagine a good world. Isn’t that extra depressing?

David Bather Woods
Yeah, that’s true. So you’re right that it’s all rigged in advance. There’s very little means of escape. It could also, in a different light, be seen as therapeutic. So half the trouble is thinking we’re entitled to happiness and discovering that we’re not, and that only makes things worse. So there’s something therapeutic in the idea that if you can adjust your mindset and think that if you achieve happiness, it was optional. It was a nice blessing, but it wasn’t it. Was never guaranteed, it was never due to you, then you might find life a little less frustrating.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Schopenhauer and living your worst life with David Bather Woods from the University of Warwick.

Ray Briggs
Is everything we see just an illusion. Do you ever get the feeling that the world makes no sense? Can music put us in touch with life’s deeper truths,

Josh Landy
Meaning, mystery, and the magic of music—along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

Noga Erez
You think you’re the boss of me, but most of the time you’re my bitch.

Josh Landy
The good thing about being a pessimist is you’re never disappointed. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about Schopenhauer with David Bather Woods from the University of Warwick, author of “Arthur Schopenhauer, the life and thought of philosophy’s greatest pessimist.”

Josh Landy
Got questions about getting the least out of life. Email us at comments at philosophy talk.org or comment on our website, and while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and wallow in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So David, Schochenhauer’s most famous book is called “The World as Will and Representation.” What does that title actually mean?

David Bather Woods
There’s one easy way to understand it which that it’s his version of the very old distinction between appearance and reality that goes all the way from Plato to Kant. The big innovation is the addition of will. The word representation is actually mainly copied from Kant, like a good Kantian Schopenhauer thinks that the experience world is partly a construction of the mind, as well as impressions received from the senses so far. So Kantian, it’s the, it’s the addition of the will, where things become more Chopin Harrier. So tell us a bit about Will, yeah. So it’s, it starts at a Kantian place. So Kant famously thought that we can’t know anything about the thing as it is in itself. Schopenhauer thought deeply about that. It was a challenge that lots of post kantians were thinking about. And he realized his big insight was that actually we’re a special type of object. The human body kind of lies on a metaphysical fault line. We are at once a representation where we have a touch and taste and spell, we have a spatiotemporal location, we have a history, but we also have this interior life where we know what it is to be the thing, and that we actually are rooted in the world, that we want things from the world. We have a kind of backstage access to a thing as it is in itself, namely ourselves. That’s the starting point, and from there, he tries to apply it by analogy to all of reality as it’s given to us as representation. So he thinks that everything is can be understood by analogy to the will. So that includes everything from human life right through animal minerals, vegetables down to the most basic forces of nature. He understands, by analogy, to the will.

Ray Briggs
So okay, there are a couple of pieces of this I want to unpack, maybe starting with things in themselves, so maybe to make it concrete, like, all right, I’m looking at a rock, and there’s lots of stuff about the rock that is its appearance. It sort of weighs a certain amount in my hand. There’s like how it feels to me, there’s how it looks. It looks to me. It looks kind of gray if I lick it. It tastes dusty and kind of gross. But these are like, in some sense, they’re just the way the rock looks to me. And maybe, maybe the dusty and gross taste of the rock is the is the most strikingly like, not anything about how the rock really is. The fact that it’s gross isn’t isn’t about the rock. It’s about me as a perceiver and my relationship with it. And like, The Rock can’t really taste gross. It tastes like gross to me and like delicious to my strange dog. But it’s not gross or not gross, really. And then, like, I might think, well, it maybe really is heavy. But I guess, like, Kant sort of worries about whether that’s, like, really about the rock, or whether it’s sort of partly about me, and like how my body works and how my nerves work. So then there’s this other idea of, like, the rock, apart from how anybody perceives it. And then there’s this like puzzle of, how do I get at that? And so Schopenhauer is trying to solve that puzzle.

David Bather Woods
Yes, yeah, more or less so. So firstly, stop licking rocks. Just a bit of advice. But the idea is that, well, one way to think about it is that if the world were only given to us as representation, we would assume that that’s all there is to. The things that we encounter in reality, but we don’t, we assume that there’s something to them beyond that. So Schopenhauer is trying to figure out what even tips us off, that there is an essence to things beyond as they appear to us. Actually another kind of way of understanding it is that there’s a kind of a strain of spinnerism. So the philosopher Brooke de Spinoza said that everything strives to persist in being. And the idea is that even the rock lowly as it is, is like you struggling for its existence. And it will. It will repel things to in order to maintain its its its existence in its essence. That’s another way of understanding what Schopenhauer is getting out with them with the idea of the will. It’s a little bit easier to understand, obviously, when we talk about non inanimate objects, and there you start to get more developed, complex expressions of the will, where the will doesn’t just will existence, but actually wills life, where life is conscious being.

Josh Landy
So here’s the way I understand the picture. Tell me if I’m right or wrong. Here, what we perceive is the world as representation. That’s the part that is essentially subjective, not necessarily subjective to me versus you. But as human beings, we perceive things a certain way that isn’t the way they actually are in themselves. What is the way things are, and what’s the ultimate reality? The ultimate reality is, will this single, undivided thing or force, or something like that, that’s outside of space, outside of time, non individuated, just one single blob, kind of roiling mass of energy. But this will somehow and for some reason, decided to generate this world of appearance. Decided to objectify itself, make it itself into objects, and it made itself into things like rocks, so minerals, and it made itself into into vegetable life, and it made itself into animal life, including and especially human life. And as you go higher and higher, things get more and more awareness, and therefore more and more suffering. But even rocks, because they are generated from will include a little bit of willing, right? They sort of want, they kind of want to stay, stay in existence, or something like that. Is that about, right? Is that about the right sort of picture of Schopenhauer metaphysics that that at the, you know, at the base of things, the real, real, real reality is will, but the will somehow manage to generate this very complicated world that we’re all living in.

David Bather Woods
Yeah, that’s That’s right. I mean, I think I should qualify by saying that Schopenhauer thinks that metaphysics is a matter of interpretation. It’s about coming up with a picture of the world that makes some amount of sense of it. And it’s almost like he’s trying to do that, where we’re trying to find the Rosetta Stone, the key to this interpretation, and the only key he can find is the one that he finds in himself by analogy to what kind of being he is. So to his eyes, this is a proposal for a way of making sense of the world that’s based on a metaphysical insight. And we have to try not to take it too literally. By saying, for instance, that rocks have actual willpower, volition, or things like that. We have to see it as the interpretation is, but that is, yeah, roughly what he thinks.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so the rock is some kind of, I don’t know, being whose true essence is will. It wants to be in existence. Maybe it wants to sit there and do nothing. How does this illuminate how I should interact with the rock, or how I get to understand the rock once I’ve realized this about it.

David Bather Woods
Now I’m thinking about the pro wrestler the rock. I’m wondering, guy, let’s see. Well, I mean, one thing it might imply, if we’re to derive any kind of practical advice from it, is is, well, it makes works better with sentient life that we should, we should have some amount of respect for its ordeal. Let’s say, let’s say, rather than suffering, because let’s say that rocks don’t suffer. They go through some ordeal of being. And for Schopenhauer, a lot of his ethics is based on having some sort of sympathy for the ordeal of other beings in which we actually, really we share. So there’s there’s that that it might change how we, how we look at the things, and maybe not make such a distinction between us and them.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Arthur Schopenhauer with David bather woods from the University of Warwick. So David, I want to come back in a moment to this question of compassion for other beings and even even the rock that Ray was so rudely licking earlier. But before we get there, I want to come back to something you were just saying a moment ago, which is about how we know things about. The will. Now, Immanuel Kant, famously, you know, had the had a sort of similar picture, as he was saying, Where there is the world as human beings perceive it, and then there’s the world as it is in itself. But Kant said, you can’t really know anything about the world as it is, really in itself, because that’s sort of a contradiction in terms. How could we possibly get outside of our own brains? Chobanau sees it differently. And you were mentioning a moment ago that one of the ways Chauvin era thinks we can actually put ourselves in touch with this ultimate reality of Willis is sort of by looking inside ourselves. We notice the extent to which we are driven by these chaotic desires. Another way, which I think is totally fascinating. He thinks we can get in touch with it’s through music. So can you say a little bit about that? Like, why does shop says the music is a copy of the will? Can you say a little bit about that? Like, how does, how does music help us see what the ultimate reality of the world actually is?

David Bather Woods
So music is a special case for Schopenhauer. All the other arts he thinks like Plato imitate. So pictures look like people and sculptures look like animals and so on. Even architecture, he thinks is a way of displaying light and gravity, whereas music, he thinks is, as you put it, a direct copy of the will. So it’s not mediated by a representation of a representation. One way to think about that might be that if you listen to a good piece of music, it’s kind of an ordeal in itself, right? Like I was just saying that everything is going through an ordeal, but music, particularly absolute music is kind of a pure ordeal. It’s not trying to depict somebody in a certain state or something like that. It’s almost like a life form in itself. When he gets very mystical about it, he says things like that, even if there were no world, there would still be music. Not sure what, what he means by that. Another nice line is that he copies live, and it’s live, and it’s said that music is when the brain is counting, it doesn’t know it’s counting, which sounds very drab, whereas Schopenhauer says when you’re listening to music, you’re doing metaphysics without knowing it, which I think sounds a bit more sexy than doing silent maths.

Josh Landy
I’m just a massive fan of Schopenhauer thoughts about art. Can we talk a little bit more about that? I mean, so we talked about music, but he also has interesting things to say about poetry. So if you think about the predicament that we’re all in, according to Schopenhauer, things are not so great in human existence. You know, maybe at best, boredom, but most of the time, suffering. One solution that he countenances is essentially run faster, so just keep having desires and satisfying them. Having desires and satisfying them. And you could think of certain aspects of contemporary American culture as sort of looking very much like this. But another is essentially to read poetry and experience art forms that are a little like poetry, which he thinks puts us out, at least temporarily, out beyond ourselves, our attachment to ourself, our desire because we lose ourselves in the beautiful object that we’re looking at. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? What? How does this work? For Schopenhauer, how is it that you know, looking at a beautiful painting or reading a beautiful poem or something like that gets us out, at least for a moment, from the suffering of human existence?

David Bather Woods
Good. So for Schopenhauer, there’s two inseparable components of an esthetic experience, whether it be art or natural beauty. There’s the one you mentioned, which is this timeless perception, this disinterested perception, which is also something that Kant picked up on. But Kant was more interested in forming objective judgments, like being kind of objective about art when making judgments of taste, but Schopenhauer, he’s more interested in the psychological release. So it’s a nice kind of temporary release from the demands of the will to life. The other side is, is deeper cognitive penetration. So here is unlike a Platonist. So a Platonist would think that art is a substandard way to acquire knowledge. We should be doing philosophy instead. But for Schopenhauer, the intuitive grasp you get of of the of this instance of the world to life is much, much deeper. And it goes deep as before. It kind of goes off the scale with music. The deepest it gets is particularly tragic poetry, so Shakespeare or somewhere, or lyric poetry that might give you the the essence of somebody’s interior life, all the emotions, all the the ordeal, again, of the of the human condition. Schopenhauer thinks that really, there is no deeper, you know, view on life than as it’s represented by a truly great poet.

Ray Briggs
So Schopenhauer was a big fan of art. I want to move to a topic that Schopenhauer was not a big fan of, which is love and. Yeah, he said lovers are traitors. Can Can you explain that line? What didn’t he like about it?

David Bather Woods
Only if you let me come back to a sense in which he did believe in love. I’ll reserve that for later, but the sense that you’re getting at is romantic love. He was down on romantic love. He thought it was very, very serious, but the very serious task was basically fine tuning the next generation of beings. He thought that, you know, romantic matches were all to do with procreation. He’s very, you know, kind of amount of his times in that respect. And therefore the rest is soap bubbles. The rest is illusions that kind of attract us to people who might be kind of not actually suited to our personal happiness, but in the eyes of the species, we’re a perfect match because we, I don’t know, level out each other’s qualities. So he thinks that romance is a ruse. Basically, that’s where he’s coming from. With that comment that you quoted.

Josh Landy
And love as a traitor is secretly plotting to perpetuate all this need and vexation. What are you? What are these fools doing making new human beings, the ideal would be to bring this whole thing to an end. I mean, so how do you do that? How do you, how do you bring this whole thing to an end? Obviously, love is the wrong way to go about it. Both. What would be the right way to be to go about things?

David Bather Woods
Yeah, so the exact opposite, which is, which is, which is no sex, not even just before marriage. But I mean, it is, it is kind of highest ethical, if you can call it the ideal. It’s asceticism. That’s why we’ve mentioned the Buddha. And then that might be other kind of saints of different religions where the goal is to get rid of the flames of desire, whether that be in the form of, you know, hunger, thirst, the sex drive, or what have you. I mean, that is outreach for most people. So I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that as kind of an antidote to dating advice, to say, oh, you should just, you know, deny the world to life, but that would be his official answer, that the first thing to go would be the sex drive.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about living your worst life. Our guest is David bather woods, author of Arthur Schopenhauer, the life and thought of philosophy’s greatest pessimist.

Ray Briggs
How do you find solace in a terrible world? Would it help to stop being so self absorbed? Can art play a role in our salvation?

Josh Landy
How to stop being yourself—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues

Lenka
Sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows—everything that’s wonderful is sure to come your way, and love is here to stay.

Ray Briggs
Is anything that’s wonderful sure to come your way? I’m Ray Briggs, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy. Our guest is David Bather Woods from the University of Warwick, and we’re thinking about Schopenhauer and living your worst life.

Ray Briggs
So David, we’ve just been talking about how Schopenhauer thinks we should be esthetics. We should get rid of all of our worldly desires, including, but not limited to sex. And so I’ve got a comment from Mandy where she seems to question this Amanda, one of our listeners says, on Facebook, better not to have expectations. They say, although I know I’m not quoting that quite accurately, she says, I still have this desire for more coffee to better engage like do we really have to give up our ordinary desires for coffee? It seems like it makes me happy and more engaged with the world.

David Bather Woods
Yeah, Schopenhauer answer to that would be along the lines of something that Joshua suggested, which is that perhaps a more achievable goal, short of full asceticism, would be what I sometimes call the semi satisfied life, which is this kind of quick rotation between not too much satisfaction, that you become bored, and not too much frustration, either. So just, just the right balance. The other thing is that, for Schopenhauer, lots of people, I mean, you’ll get your coffee and you just down it. You just, you know, you don’t even take a second to savor it, and you don’t really enjoy it, and that’s what we do when we get the things we want. And that’s part of the problem. We’re prone to just take the good things for granted. I think the advice would be in this case, that if you’re going to have the coffee, you’ve got to reflect on having it in order to generate any good feelings about it. Otherwise, you will just take it for granted. Pain is going to automatically flag itself, but the pleasure is going to take some reflection on the state of want that you’re transitioning from into a state of satisfaction so you can enjoy the coffee, but even so, you’ll have to be conscious of the satisfaction of your will in order to do it.

Josh Landy
So that sounds not too bad, but it’s true that. As you were saying earlier, Schopenhauer has a bigger ideal in mind, right? Not just the semi satisfied life, but a truly ascetic life, a life without desire, a life that is blissful because we have gotten out from under this, gotten off the wheel of Ixion, as he puts it, this this constant turmoil, this, this, this hamster wheel of desire. There’s an interesting paradox there, though, isn’t there? Because it’s almost as if he’s saying you should want not to want. You should try, not to try. You should aim, to have no aims. So how is that supposed to happen?

David Bather Woods
That’s a good question. I don’t want to get too scholarly about this, but there’s lots of schopenhau scholars who wonder, well, yeah, if a good thing is what satisfies your desire, and if it would be a good thing to be free of desires, does that mean you have a desire to be desireless? There are, you know, not to get into the weeds. But there are scholars who propose that, who think, even if Schopenhauer doesn’t say it, we have to postulate that each of us actually wants this, although we’re still very self deceived. We don’t know that we want it. That’s that’s part of the problem. We think we want. We want the coffee we want, or more, even more luxury experiences and things like that. So even if we were to realize that actually what I’m chasing is not this coffee, but the freedom from the desire that is, you know, drawing me to this coffee, even if we were to realize that we would be to that degree enlightened for Schopenhauer.

Ray Briggs
So these have been two problems about like, whether we can get off the wheel of Ixion. Maybe, maybe it’s just too far out of reach. Or maybe in order to be motivated to stop, I have to be motivated to something. And that’s already bad. I also kind of wonder whether it’s completely desirable to get off the wheel of ixan, which I think is like a big disagreement with Schopenhauer, but I don’t know. I I kind of like, I like nice food, and I know I’m gonna be hungry again in eight hours, sure, but there seems to be something very valuable about wanting the food, getting it and satisfying my desire. I’m actually not sure how to even compare that to a state where I don’t want and don’t get food. Like, why? Why is it better to not want and not get than to want and get? Yes, the wanting is frustrating, but it also brings lots of rewards. Like, it kind of seems related to the pleasure I get out of food.

David Bather Woods
This the thing I wouldn’t defend Schopenhauer on on every point, like when we’re not reflecting, as philosophers, we, we do. You know, I enjoy, I enjoy things. I’ll admit it. And actually, I would up the ante and say, you know, for someone like Nietzsche, who came after Schopenhauer, we should seek out the suffering as well, not just, not just all the pleasures. And one of the things that people think was perhaps wrong about Schopenhauer was that he assumed that our experience of desire before we satisfy it, is always a negative one, whereas people like Nietzsche pointed out that it’s not only a powerful feeling, it can be potentially a pleasurable one. I think that is a real problem that Sherpa now has to wrestle with, and there he might have to fall back on on his arguments about whether it’s worth it. So it’s one thing to enjoy a pleasure over and over again. Maybe you can derive something valuable from that, but then questioning whether it’s worth all the other things that life entails that might be a harder, a harder battle to fight.

Josh Landy
Yeah. And, you know, look, I’m a I’m a big fan of Nietzsche, and I kind of love the way in which Nietzsche picks up Schopenhauer picture, but kind of flips it on its head. Yeah, yeah. It’s true. He has a lot of suffering in life, but we have to find a way to keep going on that. Said, I still love this picture, and I love this idea that, you know, we could somehow find a way to wanting less that would bring about a lower degree of suffering. I love it that he thinks tragedy, watching tragedies is going to help, because we get disgusted with life when we watch tragedies and and somehow that disgust with life makes us want to give up and and we all of a sudden feel ourselves feeling happy, and we’re sitting there in our seat in the theater, and it’s like, why am I feeling happy while watching this horrible spectacle? And that should be the light bulb that goes off and and if enough of us feel that, and enough of us become monks, Buddhist monks, presumably, and find a way to give up will will end up taking out the will ending everything and returning everything to the blissful repose of nothingness. It’s beautiful, and it’s pretty Buddhist, right? I mean, how much is Schopenhauer influenced by Buddhism?

David Bather Woods
You’re very influenced in a word. I mean, he starts learning about Indian, classical, Indian philosophy from his university days. He picks up on Hinduism first, really, by. In the Upanishads when he’s in his mid 20s, but he becomes really impressed by Buddhism, in particular, because of all the things that anybody who knows Buddhism will be here and ring bells about the cycle of desire, about extinguishing the flames of desire, about asceticism as a path to salvation, all these things do sound about the metaphysics of oneness and sympathy and compassion based ethics. All this will sound very Buddhistic, to the point where Chopra is an interesting fact. He doesn’t ever label himself as a pessimist. To my knowledge, he praises pessimistic worldviews. He definitely castigates optimistic ones. But doesn’t say I am a pessimist, whereas he does say he’s a Buddhist in his letters as well. When he’s getting very personal, there’s a very touching letter when he’s comforting his sister, who’s kind of really on her deathbed, and trying to, you know, sort out her affairs with him, and he says, if, if you, as we Buddhists, say, exchange life, then I’ll respect your wishes, you know. And he didn’t actually, he was a bit of a pain about her estate, but, but still, the point is he, he often self described as a Buddhist, so it was very deep, personally, as well as philosophically to him.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, do you think that the Buddhism influenced his metaphysics as well as his his ethics? So I think about sort of the idea that the rock is made of will. And that’s not the idea that the rock is made of the rock’s will. It’s made of this kind of more general will. And that seems really connected to the idea that, like ourselves, are not really things, they’re mere aggregates of properties. Is that right?

David Bather Woods
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And Buddhism, as well as Hinduism, there’s a strain of both where the self is some sort of illusion and that we at least as a metaphysical doctrine, as you’re saying, we should try to get past that illusion. And what impressed Urbana about the Buddhist in particular, was that they derived an ethical message from that. So it’s not only that we are metaphysically as one, but that something follows from that morally, which he was very impressed by. It didn’t win him that many fans. There were people who were kind of opposed to his Buddhism. One of the he lost a competition that he was the only entrant in.

Josh Landy
He should have expected that. That’s impressive. Yeah. Life is painful.

David Bather Woods
Pretty brutal. Yeah, he should have been prepared for it, but he entered this and he was very rude about Hegel and lots of the post Kantian philosophers, and that was one of the reasons why they said, Oh, we can’t give you this prize, even though you’re clearly a very good writer. But in their private verdicts, one of them wrote, his Buddhism is not very good, not of much use, they said, so they could detect he was, he was a Buddhist. And they weren’t quite impressed. It was the Danish world society. One of the one of the judges, was a bishop. So they weren’t going to kind of easily get on board with his very Eastern metaphysics.

Josh Landy
But you’re saying it is of use, right? That there is this ethical consequence that if, in fact, we do recognize the way things are and adjust our behavior in the light of that, we’re actually going to be more compassionate to other people. We’re going to be we’re going to be nicer, gonna be kinder, we going to be better. Do you think? Do you buy that? Is that something that grabs you in Schopenhauer philosophy?

David Bather Woods
Yeah, a nice way he puts it, almost as a slogan, is that my moral philosophy is my metaphysics translated into action. I really like that line. And one of the upshots is, is how expansive it is that that it takes in all forms of life, particularly animal life. You know, you can trace a direct route from Schopenhauer to, you know, some of the pioneers of the International Animal Welfare movement, and I think that, yeah, some of some of our worst behaviors are rooted in our in our selfish selfishness, in our inability to see other people as not just like ourselves, but part of the situation that we’re all In. So So I do, I do think that there’s something to be said for that. It’s a reason why it’s got such staying power. Schopenhauer thought that these philosophies have hung around in human civilization all over the world, because there’s something to them.

Ray Briggs
So, David, we’re almost out of time now that you know all of this stuff about Schopenhauer that we’ve been discussing, is there one thing you’d go back and tell your teenage self who first became fascinated with him?

David Bather Woods
Yeah, like any teenager, there came a point where I wanted to rebel from Schopenhauer, and there were lots of people who would help me with that that I’ve already mentioned Nietzsche. But actually, the more that I’ve stuck with Schopenhauer, the more I’ve thought he’s right about a lot of things. I may be wrong about a lot of things too, but in particular, the idea that to be moral, to be ethical, you have to have a good heart. I think there is a lot of callousness and there’s a lot of cruelty. One of his great insights is that the word compassion is a synonym for the word humanity. We could say, show a little compassion, or show. A little humanity. I think that’s something that certainly has become truer over the years.

Josh Landy
David, thank you so much for joining us today. It has been, I want to say, relatively painless—is that is that high Schopenhauerian praise?

David Bather Woods
That’s pretty good. That’s, that’s, that’s good enough.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for being with us today.

David Bather Woods
Thank you.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been David Bather Woods, professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick and author of the forthcoming book, “Arthur Schopenhaue: the life and thought of philosophy’s greatest pessimist.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I think I’m still inclined toward the view that the world is only contingently terrible and not necessarily terrible, but I appreciate that Schopenhauer has advice for detaching yourself from desires that are making you miserable and being compassionate toward others, and that might be useful whether the world is contingently terrible or not.

Josh Landy
Yeah. I mean, I kind of help thinking it’s time for a show passant like, you know, what better time than the than the current, our current situation for this philosophy of everything being terrible to come back in a big way. Hopefully, David will do that with his new book, which is so great. We’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophy talk.org where you can also become a subscriber and question everything our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
Now a man who doesn’t have time to sit around being miserable: it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Arthur Schopenhauer, was a young man when he turned out the world as will and representation, an explanation of life, the universe and our place in it, chaos, absurdity, cruelty, exploitation, violence, reality, which he called will. The other half of reality is representation, our perceptions. Reality is only as real as our senses. Yet we know there’s more to it, and we are driven by the same furious striving as everything else, weather, dogs, rocks, monads, whatever senses have limits. Dogs can’t see colors. Rocks aren’t alive. Humans need glasses, but it’s all just rearranging details. Blow ups if we want to break the veil, so to speak, reason won’t fill the bill. We need genius. We need art, something and bring us bliss to live in the anxiety briefly, because it’s all meaningless. We’re not finding gold at the end of this rainbow, though, rainbows are nice. Don’t get me wrong. There’s no God, but we can intuit the face of Hulu monsters from the head Godzilla a modern world in the offing zombie movies. None of this is remotely metaphysical. What we see is what we get with moments of seeing a bit more than we normally see, if we have genius. Genius Schopenhauer, however, was a rather unpleasant fellow kicked out of school as a boy for mocking a teacher. His own mother eventually refusing to have any more to do with him because he was such a snot at the University of Berlin, he booked his first lecture the same time as Hegel’s, who was a bonavid, philosophical superstar. Nobody showed up. He spent his subsequent life in the same book, crammed apartment, finding himself in hot water later in life when he got into a fight with a neighboring seamstress who was talking too loud in the vest. Loud in the vestibule, he wound up pushing her and dragging her down a flight of stairs. She sued for damages. Schopenhauer fled to Italy. By the time he returned, he had lost two court cases and had to pay her a monthly damage fee for the rest of her life. He had better relations with this cleaning lady who actually had a room in his room. She cooked, cleaned and helped care for his dog. Yes, the cranky old guy had a poodle, two one white and later one brown, both named Atman, a Sanskrit word meaning essence or true self. Did the two poodles have the same essence? Were they the same dog? If so, was there another Schopenhauer also in the world, yelling at kids to get off his lawn? I suppose there are places for doppelgangers, doggy and other in the chaos we call The Universe. Poodles began as petching Dogs Go fetch the duck, big fella, good dog. Poodles are very smart, which means, in doggy terms, they do what you tell them. In the 18th century, they began to be bred as show dogs, trimming their fur, bringing them to the circus to walk on high wires and braid in circles on the hind legs with their poor paws perched on the shoulders of the poodles before them. Pretty sure, Schopenhauer did not train his opponents to do much of anything except don’t poop on the books. Now, poodle grooming began when owners trimmed the legs so the legs so the heavy hair wouldn’t get waterlogged when duck fetching, it became a design element for dog shows and lo the mighty poodle was soon bred to be shrunken the toy poodle, another poofy yapper dog dyed pink or lavender from what was once a mighty breed. Take that nature. You sun, growing trees, you bird, eating bugs, you bugs eating our buried bones, the creepy circle of life that eats itself, Ouroboros, zombie vampires. It’s not fair. But as we grow closer to the final days, we’re now more blunt, throwing empathy out the hobble window, true crimes, the plants, true justice. But frankly, I’m not expecting the End Times anytime soon. We’ll just spin in chaos, devouring ourselves. Know there’s nothing left but a big, screaming mouth trying to eat itself. That’s why we dress up the poodle. We know it’s really Cujo in there. We know there’s a pack of starved wolves inside every sleepy puppy, but if a supplier will to reality before you know it, you got a pack of pink poodles doing tricks for kibble. You know, Schopenhauer could have got ahead of the curve, existentialism wise, and got into the pet grooming business. Combine it with carriage detailing. Primp your puppy. Pimp Your ride shop. Schopenhauer, he probably would have been a lot happier. Of course, he would have just died anyway. Thanks for nothing, Schopenhauer. I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2025.

Josh Landy
Our executive producer is James Kass. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura McGuire is the Director of Research.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or misexpressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophy talk.org where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Gilmore Girls
We have cheese. We have drinks. Do you each have a coaster? Kierkegaard. Schopenhauer. Excellent!