A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes (3 page)

That is why one must judge all of history’s greatest monsters by their
intentions:
Hitler, Stalin.

If Hitler believed that the Jews were the malady of the world, he was in order from a moral point of view, even though he was wrong.
But if he did so out of personal interest, then it is immoral.
Morality, for him, is moral will, goodwill.

Aristotle, this is classification, order,
the objective world.

Man considered as object, animal.

Marx.
For Marx, man is object.

[Witold disagrees].
The artist must be in the subjective.

Read Kant’s biography by Thomas de Quincey.

Fourth Lesson

Thursday, May 1, 1969

Schopenhauer

After Kant, there is a line of thought which could be outlined as follows:
Fichte
Schelling German Idealism
Hegel
“Idealism” why?
Because it is subjective philosophy which is concerned with ideas.

Kant had two successors (curious thing) of two different types:
Schopenhauer
Nietzsche
Arthur Schopenhauer (19th century).

Born in Danzig.

He adopts the Kantian system with a formidable difference, which consists of the following.

After Kant, all philosophers wanted to be involved with the thing in itself, the absolute.
Yet Schopenhauer gets up and says, “It so happens that
no one knows what a thing is in itself, and well, me, I do know.”

The world is stupefied, and Schopenhauer continues: “I know it from internal intuition.”
Intuition means direct knowledge, not reasoned but “absolute.”

Schopenhauer’s reasoning is as follows.

Man is also a thing.
Therefore, if I myself am a thing, I must seek my absolute in my intuition, what I am in my essence.
And, says Schopenhauer, “I know that the most elementary and fundamental thing in myself is the will to live.”

Here a door opens to a new philosophical thinking: philosophy stops being an intellectual demonstration, in order to enter into direct contact with life.
For me (in France, almost no one shares my opinion) it is an extremely important date that opens the path to Nietzsche’s will to power, and to all of existential philosophy.
We must understand that Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system did not take hold; in this sense, Schopenhauer did not express something solid.
Which is why, I suppose, that Schopenhauer has not held his own as a philosopher.

BUT WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
No philosophical system lasts for very long.
But for me, philosophy has
THE SUPREME VALUE OF ORGANIZING THE WORLD IN A VISION.

For example, there are the extremely grandiose Kantian and Hegelian universes, there is also Nietzsche’s, and it is there where Schopenhauer is important.

Let us move from this vision of Schopenhauer to the Schopenhauerian world.

This is the first time that philosophy touches life.

What is the will to live for Schopenhauer?

He himself says that he uses these words because nothing better comes to mind.
In truth, it is more the will to be, because for Schopenhauer, not only do man and animals want to live, but also the rock that resists and the light that persists.
Schopenhauer says that this is the Kantian
noumenon
, this is the absolute.

IMPORTANT
For Schopenhauer, in the metaphysical sense (beyond physical), this concerns a single will to be, absolutely identical for me and for this table.

This will to live, in order to be seen as phenomenon, must assume [
sentence incomplete
].

It must exist in space and time, in the numerical order of things.
It is a single entity, because the numerical world knows neither time nor object, nor anything of the kind.

But when this will to live passes to the phenomenological world, becoming a phenomenon limited by time and space, then it inevitably becomes divided.
By the effect of a law that Schopenhauer called
principium individuationis
, it becomes individual, specific.
I repeat: Kant demonstrated that we can never penetrate the world of
noumena;
for instance, it is impossible, with reasoning, to prove the existence of God.
In this sense, Kant said that our reasoning is limited to the phenomenological world.
Time and space are not beyond us, it is the thinking subject which introduces them into the world, therefore we cannot perceive anything infinite, universal like God.

It is only in time and space that the
noumenon
can manifest itself as phenomenon.
It is for this reason that Schopenhauer says that the
will to live is a noumenon
.
It is beyond time and space, it is within itself and can manifest itself only when it becomes a phenomenon (limited in time and space).

When the will to live is manifested in the phenomenological world, it is divided into a countless number of things that consume one another in order to live.
The wolf feeds on the cat, the cat on the mouse,
etc.

Schopenhauer’s great merit is to have found that decisive thing: death, pain, the eternal war that each being must wage in order to survive.

I always considered that philosophy must not be intellectual but something which starts from our sensibility.
For example, for me, the simple fact that I am aware of the existence of a tree has no importance until it brings me pleasure or pain.
Only then does it become significant.
It is this idea which I try to introduce in interviews,
etc.

We are in an absolutely tragic world.
They say that Schopenhauer is pessimistic.
That is not saying very much.
It is a grandiose and tragic vision which, unfortunately, coincides perfectly with reality.
Schopenhauer deduces several conclusions from his system.

For example, nature is not concerned only with individuals but with the species.
Millions of ants must die in order to generate the species.
Likewise, if a man sacrifices himself in a battle, it is also
for the same reason.
Finally, Schopenhauer was a raging misogynist for the very simple reason that women are involved with the continuation of the species.
He said that in love as well, personal happiness cannot exist because the individual is sacrificed for the species.
It is very moving, that attentive way in which a young man looks at a young girl, and
vice versa
.
They only want to know whether they can have children “of good quality.”

We look for our opposites in the opposite sex: big nose, small nose,
etc.
Man can never attain individual happiness.
Our will to live forces us to consume others or to be consumed by them.
As a result, Schopenhauer analyzes various noble feelings (example: the woman’s love for the child); he demonstrates that all that goes against individual happiness.
After that, he likewise shows that what one calls happiness or pleasure is nothing more than the satisfying of a malaise.
If you enjoy eating steak, it is because you felt hungry beforehand.

For Schopenhauer, life is a continuous, culpable malaise.

According to Schopenhauer, what possibility is there of leaving this hellish
imbroglio?

Suicide?
No, this would be useless because by committing suicide, we only confirm our will to live.
Because if I kill myself, it is because my will to live was not satisfied.

The sole way of breaking free of the will to live is by renunciation.

I kill my will to live within myself
.

This is what led Schopenhauer to Hindu philosophy and Eastern philosophy, which is exactly what promulgates meditation and the renunciation of life.

It must be said that this thesis is rather artificial and that the part of his work devoted to eastern philosophy, on the
World as Will and Representation
, is the least convincing.

Fifth Lesson

Friday, May 2, 1969

Schopenhauer recognizes two possibilities:
1.
To affirm the will to live by fully participating in life with its cruelties and its injustices.

2.
Not suicide, but
meditation
.

Schopenhauer considers that the contemplation of the world “as if it were a game” is absolutely superior to life.
He demonstrates this in an extremely ingenious way.
The one who contemplates the world and is filled with wonder is the artist.
Now, in this sense, the artist resembles a child, because the child also marvels at the world in a disinterested way.
It is for this reason, says Schopenhauer, that children are brilliant, simply because they are children.
During our first few years, we make more progress than during the rest of our life.
That is why, in the East, the yogi (the one who meditates) attains the unique possibility of suppressing life.

Schopenhauer formulates an artistic theory which, for me, is the most important of all.
And, just between us, the extremely naïve and incomplete manner of dealing with art in France is due primarily to the ignorance of Schopenhauer.

Art shows us nature’s game and its forces, namely the will to live.
Schopenhauer is
concrete
in this matter.
He asks: why does the façade of a cathedral charm us, when a simple wall does not interest us?
It is because the will to live of matter is expressed in weight and resistance.
Now, a wall does not display
the game of these forces, since each particle of the wall both resists and carries weight.
While a cathedral façade shows these forces in action, since the columns resist and the capitals press down.
We see the struggle between weight and resistance.
He also explains to us why a twisted (curved) column does not satisfy us.
Quite simply because it does not resist enough.
In the same way, a rounded column is better than a square column.

All this to tell you how Schopenhauer sees
ART
.
It is meditation that he sets in opposition to life.

He also deals with
sculpture
and says that the beauty of man derives from
a priori
anticipation based on experience.
The human body is all the more successful since it is well adapted to its ends.
He adds that there is within us an ideal of human beauty, which consists of prolonging in the future what we consider to be of quality today, such as long legs.
This quality always obliges man to go further in this direction, health,
etc.
One could say that this is a kind of dream about the design of the species in the future.

For Schopenhauer, the beauty of
Greek sculpture
consisted in a discernment between sexual in
stinct and beauty.
In a word, Greek beauty is not exciting, and that is why it is superior.

Painting
.
If sculpture is primarily concerned with beauty and charm, painting seeks expression, passion, and character in man.
Therefore, in painting one can also consider the ugly to be handsome.
Example: an old woman.
Character unifies a person in painting, because character is what unifies in a sense (direction); if not, man would be disparate.

Literature
.
The artist, in general, does not function by concepts of logic, of abstractions, but has direct intuition of the will to live in the world.

For this reason, Schopenhauer notes that discursive literature which tries to prove something is useless.
One cannot make art with abstract principles, with concepts.
If I have something to say about a subject, for example, about illegitimate children, I shall simply say it in a lecture and not in a work of art.

The work of art seeks the concrete, but in the concrete, it rediscovers the universal, the will to live.
Think of the miser in Molière.
He is a concrete character who has a life, a hair color, etc., but through him we can see avarice in its universal sense.
Schopenhauer
gives the definition of the genius, which is still very close to that of the child.
The genius is disinterested
.
He has fun with the world.
He perceives its atrocities but delights in its atrocities.
The genius in general is useless in practical life, because he does not seek his personal interest.
He is antisocial, but sees the world better because he is
objective
.

Schopenhauer makes a very good comparison in saying that a mediocre man’s intelligence resembles a flashlight, which shines only on what it is seeking, whereas a superior intelligence is like the sun, which illuminates everything.
From there derives
the objectivity of the art of the genius
.
It is
disinterested
.

Schopenhauer said much on the subject of genius, for example that the genius cannot live normally; the artist always has an obstacle which prevents him from living: illness, abnormality, infirmity, homosexuality,
etc.

(Intelligent men are highly sensitive to noise).
Me, personally, I interpret this by the fact that
we sense better what we lack
.
Example: a cavalry officer does not even realize that he is healthy, whereas an invalid like Chopin has an acute notion of health, because he lacks it.

One can observe phenomena like Beethoven who, personally, was hysterical and unhappy, yet in his art so well expressed health, balance (no doubt because he lacked these).

Myself, I attach the highest importance to
antinomy in art
.
An artist must be that and its opposite.
Mad, disorganized but also disciplined, cold, rigorous.
Art is never a single thing, but is always compensated by its opposite.

Schopenhauer is not really philosophy, but rather intuitiveness and morality.
He was outraged that on a Pacific island each year, sea tortoises emerge from the water to procreate on the beach, where they are flipped over and devoured by the island’s wild dogs.
He said, “This is life, this is what has been systematically repeated for millennia, each spring.”

Why don’t we read more Schopenhauer?

Why isn’t he current?