[Music] arthur schopenhauer the wolverine of german philosophy the undisputed champion of philosophical masturbation and pessimism schopenhauer was born in 1788 in danzig city in poland in his famous work the world has will and representation schopenhauer discusses the will to live as being an irrational blind incessant impulse without knowledge that drives instinctive behaviors causing an endless insatiable striving in human existence in which nature could not exist without doesn't this remind us of the coke junkie sigmund freud and his pleasure principle rhetorical question schopenhauer argues that the world we experience around us exists merely as representation dependent
on the cognizing subject's will to live not as a world that can be considered to exist in itself independently schopenhauer identifies the thing in itself the inner essence of everything as well the world as representation is therefore the objectification of the will in other words our knowledge of objects and the world is thus knowledge of mere phenomena rather than things in themselves based on this schopenhauer concludes that to convince a man you must appeal to his self-interest his desires his will it is as if he's saying that you must appeal to the way a man
views the world in order to convince him schopenhauer considers that aesthetic experiences like producing or perceiving art releases a person briefly from his endless servitude to the will which is the root of suffering aesthetic perception thus transforms an individually oriented state of consciousness to a universally oriented state of consciousness since art is universal this universally oriented state of consciousness is what schwoppenhauer calls a pure willless painless and timeless subject of knowledge schopenhauer believes that the true salvation from our miserable existence can only result from the total ascetic negation of the will to life the state
of composure in which this negation ends is a state of willlessness or the absence of will the will is characterized as including episodes of desiring and striving towards ends and effective states that result from the attainment or non-attainment of ends in willlessness all such states are conceived as absent from a subject's consciousness cognition occurs but known appearances no longer act as motives for willing the negation of the will in other words stems from the inside that reveals individuality to be merely an illusion and that the world in itself free from the forms of space and
time is one ascetic practices schopenhauer remarks are used to aid the wills self-abolition which brings about a blissful redemptive willless state of emptiness that is free from striving or suffering [Music]
