The Philosophy of the Will | Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer's central claim was this: the wanting that will not stop is not a personal failure. It is the inner nature of things. This narration follows the full arc of his philosophy and his life - from a merchant's warehouse in Hamburg where a brilliant young man spent two years in the wrong life, through the Frankfurt apartment where he spent thirty-three years being right about something that nobody acknowledged, to the September morning when the review finally arrived and he folded the newspaper and fed his poodle and went for his walk. Through The World as Will and Representation, the philosophy of desire and aesthetic release, the ethics of compassion, and the specific question of what actually quiets the restless mind - Schopenhauer's complete philosophy, for sleep. -- Books referenced in this narration: The World as Will and Representation - Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga and Paralipomena - Arthur Schopenhauer Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer - Penguin Classics On the Suffering of the World - Arthur Schopenhauer The Art of Being Happy - Arthur Schopenhauer Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl Thus Spake Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke -- 00:00:00 - Frankfurt, September 1851 00:05:11 - The house in Danzig 00:09:34 - The merchant's apprentice 00:13:57 - The universities and what he found there 00:18:20 - The will 00:22:43 - The mother in Weimar 00:27:06 - India and the veil 00:31:29 - The World as Will and Representation 00:35:52 - Venice and the opera 00:40:15 - Berlin and the empty lecture hall 00:44:38 - Why desire is suffering 00:49:01 - The aesthetic release 00:53:24 - Music above all 00:57:47 - The ethics of compassion 01:02:10 - The ascetic ideal 01:06:33 - Venice, 1818 01:10:56 - Frankfurt and the poodles 01:15:19 - The long silence 01:19:42 - What the pessimist actually believes 01:24:05 - Hegel and the rivalry 01:28:28 - The poodle named Butz 01:32:51 - The unconscious will 01:37:14 - Schopenhauer and Nietzsche 01:41:37 - What actually quiets the will 01:46:00 - The night he heard Rossini again 01:50:23 - Buddhism and the parallel 01:54:46 - Sleep as nirvana 01:59:09 - The sentence in the preface 02:03:32 - The conversation with the visitor 02:07:55 - The recognition, September 1851 02:12:18 - The conversation he never repeated 02:16:41 - Frankfurt, the final decade 02:21:04 - The morning walk 02:25:27 - The dog and the philosopher 02:29:50 - What the will rests in 02:34:13 - Frankfurt, September 1851, again -- PhiloPsych Sleep - serious philosophy and psychology, delivered gently, for minds that think too much at night. New long-form essays for deep rest, drawn from the thinkers who sat with the same questions you carry into the dark. -- A note, from me to you: I came to Schopenhauer through a sentence Tolstoy had underlined in a letter he sent to a friend in the 1860s. Tolstoy called Schopenhauer the clearest thinker of the century, and the sentence he had underlined was about the relationship between understanding suffering and being free of it - that understanding does not free you of it, but changes its quality, gives you a small distance from the insistence of the wanting. I read that and needed to find the original. I spent several months with the original. This narration is what came of that time. He is not a comfortable philosopher. But he may be one of the most useful ones, for the kind of nights when the wanting will not stop. -- #PhiloPsychSleep #Schopenhauer #PhilosophyForSleep #SleepNarration #FallAsleep #Overthinking #InnerPeace #Philosophy