A sort of negative evaluation of the human world creating desire as a problem to be solved.

Powerful strain of indian eastern pessimism which is a combination of hinduism and buddhism.

“The world as will and idea”, a great book that takes the tradition of German idealism and inverts some of the main ideas.

Thomas Mann refer to this book as a symphony in form movements. It’s sort of a verbal music, has a high poetic content.

Kant think there are people and there are objects. But we can never experience these objects in an unmediated way. Acutally we actively construct those objects by imposing on categories we can’t avoid. Such as space, time, causality, numbers, etc. And this is built into experiencing the world as a subject.

And we can never know the ding on zig (thing in itself). I can’t experiecne the podium as it really is. I guess in the mind of god it’s independent of space, time and causality and number. But I have to look through the window (the apriori forms). I have no choice and the only access to it.

In the first chapter. Schopenhauer think the world is what Kant says it is, it’s one a big idea. So we have all these overlapping forms and our whole experiencing of the world is one big idea.

In the second chapter, Schopenhauer tries to invert kant and says there is one example. The one thing in itself that I can know is the will, my own self consciousness. That is not mediated by the apriori forms, I have direct immediate apprehension of that fact. The external world is mediated by the apriori forms. The internal world is not the way kant think it is. It’s one unitary thing will. Here the view is like Hobbes said we are desiring animals. Schopenhauer will say yes, we are desiring animals. But we do not know ourselves, we do not really know our own wills. Consciouness is only a subset of will. Reason is only a subset of will. Will is a force that reason neither controls nor understands. We are subject to a terrifying force bigger than we are mysterious to us that we are unable to control. So we lose that enlightment optimism, the idea that we are in control, we are reasonable animals in control of our wills. In fact, the will is controlling us and the will is a mysterious force that we find in not just in individual but in all of nature and in all of human beings as a whole. So it’s one big unitray thing.

Will is a blind and ateleological force which animates all of nature. It’s an extremely sort of pessimistic view of the human psyche. We are play things in the hand of not even gods but something less than god because it doesn’t have a will and doesn’t like us. It just is what it is. In some ways it’s anti-socratic. It means essentially that you can’t know yourself or that if you can know yourself, it’s only after the facts.

Then what we get? we get world as outside and world as inside. The world as outside is the world as idea. The world as inside is the world as will. This faces us with a problem. What the hell are we and how are we to deal with all these difficulties that the world confronts us with. Because we are desiring animals? And desire is a purely negative condition. Here comes the buddhism, the hinduism and that kind of pessimistic eastern philosophy.

This introduction of the idea of will into German philosophy is going to be pregant with very important consequences for the late ninteenth and early twentieth century if you think of people like Nietzsche.

The last two movements of this great philosophical symphony, this kind of exercise and negativity are an attempt to solve the problem of the world as idea in movement three and then movement four it’s an attempt to solve the problem of the world as will.

What mysticism and asceticism have in common is the fact that they both long for the abolition of self worship of your own extinction. It’s embracing your own finitude because the particular time and space and experience contained within your finitude are relentlessly awful. This longing for extinction is sort of a philosophical suicide or a sort of ode to death.

The conclusion that Schopenhauer draws here about human condition are two. First of all is inverted and bizarre and negative. He says Leibniz is wrong. This is actually the worst possible of all worlds. If it was any worse it wouldn’t exist at all. It’s just good enough so that it has some existence, but if the world got any worse, it just wouldn’t exist and the fact it exist shows how bad it is.

The second proposition is that it’s better not to be born. We are a bundle of desires. We are a collection of questions. Our desires never get satisfied and our questions never get answered. And you get stuck with them. Schopenhauer says I just want to throw in the towel and release me. But there is no god to pray to, so he does this.

So mysticism and asceticism is the solution to the problem of the self. The solution of the problem of subjectivity is ethics and aesthetics.