Schopenhauer

In Our Time: Philosophy

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2009

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests AC Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile and Christopher Janaway discuss the dark, pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.As a radical young thinker in Germany in the early 19th century, Schopenhauer railed against the dominant ideas of the day. He dismissed the pre-eminent German philosopher Georg Hegel as a pompous charlatan, and turned instead to the Enlightenment thinking of Immanuel Kant for inspiration. Schopenhauer's central idea was that everything in the world was driven by the Will - broadly, the ceaseless desire to live. But this, he argued, left us swinging pointlessly between suffering and boredom. The only escape from the tyranny of the Will was to be found in art, and particularly in music. Schopenhauer was influenced by Eastern philosophy, and in turn his own work had an impact well beyond the philosophical tradition in the West, helping to shape the work of artists and writers from Richard Wagner to Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus to Sigmund Freud.AC Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Beatrice Han-Pile is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex; Christopher Janaway is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:09.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.0	Hello, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhau was born in Danzig in eastern Germany in 1788.
0:18.0	As a young man he wasn't lacking in confidence.
0:20.0	He argued with the great novelist Goeter and Lambastit Hegel, the predominant philosopher of the day.
0:26.0	His central idea was that everything in the world is fundamentally united by a will to live.
0:31.0	Its two key features are that it is infinite and meaningless and
0:34.9	leads to boredom or suffering. The only escape from this he argued comes
0:38.7	through self-denial or art pre-eminently music.
0:42.8	This pessimistic worldview,
0:43.9	carried Schopenhous influence well beyond philosophy.
0:46.6	His thinking marks the music of Richard Wagner
0:49.0	and finds echoes in the work of Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hardy,
0:52.2	and Albert Camille. To discuss the work of Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hardy and Albert Camue. To discuss the philosophy
0:54.8	Arthur Schopenhauer, I'm joined by Anthony Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College
0:59.3	University of London. Beatrice Han Pyle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex and
1:04.4	Christopher Janoway, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton.
1:08.2	Anthony Graling Schopenhauer came of age in the early 19th century Germany at that time a dominant philosopher in Germany
1:16.0	is Hegel before we come to Schopenhauer can you give us a sense of Hegel and his
1:20.5	hegemony of philosophy at the time? Well it's very interesting that when shevenhow was a young student, in fact,
1:25.5	Hegel hadn't yet made a reputation, but he did very soon after shepenera had begun his own work in philosophy. This was round about 1820 I suppose, by which time
1:36.1	Hegel was the professor of philosophy at Berlin, the most prestigious philosophy appointment in Germany at the time,
	...

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