Miroslav Volf confronts Schopenhauer’s pessimism and unquenchable thirst with a vision of love that affirms the world. “Unquenchable thirst makes for ceaseless pain. This befits our nature as objectification of the ceaseless and aimless will at the heart of reality. ... For Schopenhauer, the pleasure of satisfaction are the lights of fireflies in the night of life’s suffering. These four claims taken together make pain the primordial, universal, and unalterable state of human lives.” In the second installment of his 2025 Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf examines the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s radical rejection of the world. Through Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of blind will and insatiable desire, Volf draws out the philosopher’s haunting pessimism and hatred for existence itself. But Schopenhauer’s rejection of the world—rooted in disappointed love—is not just a historical curiosity; Volf shows how our modern consumerist cravings mirror Schopenhauer’s vision of unquenchable thirst and fleeting satisfaction. In response, Volf offers a theological and philosophical critique grounded in three kinds of love—epithumic (appetitive), erotic (appreciative), and agapic (self-giving)—arguing that agape love must be central in our relationship to the world. “Everything is a means, but nothing satisfies,” Volf warns, unless we reorder our loves. This second lecture challenges listeners to reconsider what it means to live in and love a world full of suffering—without abandoning its goodness. ### Episode Highlights 1. “Unquenchable thirst makes for ceaseless pain. This befits our nature as objectification of the ceaseless and aimless will at the heart of reality.” 2. “Whether we love ice cream or sex or God, we are often merely seeking to slake our thirst.” 3. “If we long for what we have, what we have never ceases to satisfy.” 4. “A better version is available—for whatever reason, it is not good enough. And we discard it. This is micro-rejection of the world.” 5. “Those who love agape refuse to act as if they were the midpoint of their world.” ### Helpful Links and Resources - [*The World as Will and Representation* by Arthur Schopenhauer](https://store.doverpublications.com/products/9780486217611?srsltid=AfmBOoqJu-G3QvY1SZqM-dlBf-gIh1RyqKQlVBSv8q_eS8yRs4eCGouX) - [*Paradiso* by Dante Alighieri](https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/paradiso/paradiso-1/) - [Victor Hugo’s *Les Misérables*](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/135) - [*A Brief for the Defense* by Jack Gilbert](https://poetrysociety.org/poems/a-brief-for-the-defense) ### Show Notes - Schopenhauer’s pessimism as rooted in disappointed love of the world - God’s declaration in Genesis—“very good”—contrasted with Schopenhauer’s “nothing is good” - Job’s suffering as a theological counterpoint to Schopenhauer’s metaphysical despair - Human desire framed as unquenchable thirst: pain, boredom, and fleeting satisfaction - Schopenhauer’s diagnosis: we swing endlessly between pain and boredom - Three kinds of love introduced: epithumic (appetite), erotic (appreciation), agapic (affirmation) - Schopenhauer’s exclusive emphasis on appetite—no place for appreciation or unconditional love - Modern consumer culture mirrors Schopenhauer’s account: desiring to desire, never satisfied - Fast fashion, disposability, and market-induced obsolescence as symptoms of world-negation - “We long for what we have” vs. “we discard the world” - Luther’s critique: “suck God’s blood”—epithumic relation to God - Agape love: affirming the other, even when undeserving or diminished - Erotic love: savoring the intrinsic worth of things, not just their utility - The fleetingness of joy and comparison’s corrosion of value - Modern desire as invasive, subliminally shaped by market competition - Denigration of what is in favor of what could be—a pathology of dissatisfaction - Consumerism as massive “micro-rejection” of the world - Volf’s call to reorder our loves toward appreciation and unconditional affirmation - Theology and metaphysics reframe suffering not as a reason to curse the world, but to love it better - Preview of next lecture: Nietzsche, joy, and the affirmation of all existence **Production Notes** - This podcast featured Miroslav Volf - Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa - Hosted by Evan Rosa - Production Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge - A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give Special thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.
Miroslav Volf confronts Schopenhauer’s pessimism and unquenchable thirst with a vision of love that affirms the world.
“Unquenchable thirst makes for ceaseless pain. This befits our nature as objectification of the ceaseless and aimless will at the heart of reality. ... For Schopenhauer, the pleasure of satisfaction are the lights of fireflies in the night of life’s suffering. These four claims taken together make pain the primordial, universal, and unalterable state of human lives.”
In the second installment of his 2025 Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf examines the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s radical rejection of the world. Through Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of blind will and insatiable desire, Volf draws out the philosopher’s haunting pessimism and hatred for existence itself. But Schopenhauer’s rejection of the world—rooted in disappointed love—is not just a historical curiosity; Volf shows how our modern consumerist cravings mirror Schopenhauer’s vision of unquenchable thirst and fleeting satisfaction. In response, Volf offers a theological and philosophical critique grounded in three kinds of love—epithumic (appetitive), erotic (appreciative), and agapic (self-giving)—arguing that agape love must be central in our relationship to the world. “Everything is a means, but nothing satisfies,” Volf warns, unless we reorder our loves. This second lecture challenges listeners to reconsider what it means to live in and love a world full of suffering—without abandoning its goodness.
Episode Highlights
Helpful Links and Resources
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically, and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Miroslav Volf: At the end of Genesis one, God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good for Schopenhauer, this is the worst possible words in the Bible. God creates wantonly and for his own pleasure. The world of distress and misery, and then even applauds himself with everything was very good to God's.
Everything is good. Schopenhauer responds. Nothing is good. The cost of rejecting the world's original goodness and recognizing only Epithumeia is a source for ultimate rejection of the world, as means to an end. Far from being deeply meaningful gifts to each other. Human beings driven by unquenchable appetite are mainly competitors and each potential prey
Evan Rosa: look around you. There are plenty of reasons to hate the world, to seek to escape it, whether into a heavenly abode, a drug-induced stupor, maybe a space colony, or maybe some world less nothingness. The 19th century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, most consistent pessimist among western thinkers argues that it would be better for the world just not to exist.
His hatred for the world, Miroslav Volf suggests is actually a disappointed love for the world and his love for the world, like most of ours is merely an appetite, a craving arising from an unfillable void. This past May Miroslav Volf looked at these provocative questions about the disappointment in and the hatred for the world.
In his second of five lectures delivered at the University of Aberdeen for the 2025 Gifford lectures Miroslav's series, entitled Amor Mundi, sincerely considered God's love for the world and what that should mean for our love for the world, including God. Creation and even each other. A special thanks to Paul Nimmo and Paula Duncan at the University of Aberdeen for allowing us to run these lectures in the podcast feed and for the support of the Templeton Religion Trust, which helped make the lectures possible.
We'll continue to share the audio from these lectures over the coming weeks, and we hope you enjoy listening. Here's the second installment of Miroslav Volf's Gifford lectures, odium Mooni, Schopenhauer on suffering, and the will to nothingness.
Miroslav Volf: Good evening to all of you. The last lecture was about the challenge of loving and ambivalent world, whether one is thst or atheist, or anything in between. A world of beauty and the world of ugliness, world of goodness. And of course now I want to present an atheist case that we ought not love the world but actually hate it.
The case rest on an account of human desire, desire as appetite. In the last lecture I used it, I used chocolate, my love for chocolate flour, uh, flowerless chocolate cake to illustrate that kind of desire. Now, whether we are atheist, like Schopenhauer or not, many of us are relating to the world with the same kind of chocolate cake desires, but we end up, actually, this will be my argument, hating the world, whether we intend so or not.
Bob Vol. This kind of critique is this, this is not, will not be a critique of Schopenhauer only, but of the desire that dominates our lives. Schopenhauer will be my springboard into that. I'll tell you the point where you can fall asleep for a while if you are absolutely not interested in Schauer and I, I go, I, I I will promise that I will wake you up when things become really important and interesting.
Okay? We know and we understand why Job cursed. The day in which he was born, Marding bans fire from heaven, and terrible winds destroyed his possessions and killed all his children, as if that were not horrible enough. In the second test of job's, faithfulness sa Satan afflicted his whole body with sores.
Still, Satan was losing a wager with God. That job would curse God if his suffering were great enough. Left alone with his wi wife and his pain and grief job's, faith in God and in life, nevertheless seemed unshaken. Shall we receive good at the hand of God and not receive evil? He said to his skeptical, maybe rightly skeptical wife, but then his friends came to visit sitting for seven days in silence and mourning as they observed the ruin of a great man.
Or were they secretly gloating as well? Job saw himself through their eyes. Then he opened his mouth and he cursed. Job did not curse God though. He came a ha's breath from letting Satan win the bet. Instead, job cursed a day on which he was born. Wishing. Wishing fervently for some grand time turner so as to undo a temporal slice of creation.
He wished for the sea to have covered the dry land on that day when he was born, and for it starts to have been extinguished. Why? Because it did not shut the doors of my mother's womb and hide trouble from my eyes. Had he been stillborn, he imagines he would have led Anine existence in Haes, but at least he would've been there where we could cease from troubling and weary or addressed in the midst of the ordeal.
And before his friends job became a twofold pessimist, at least regarding his own life. He was a pessimist of suffering, claiming that it would have been better for him not to have been born. That's definition of pessimist. He also also a pessimist of redemption. His own hope for himself reduced to an untroubled semi existence.
Great. An inexplicable suffering made pessimist of job a while. We don't know what made a pessimist of Schopenhauer for life a more extreme one than job was. Even at Job's lowest point. As for suffering, Schopenhauer considered it endemic to existence itself. As for redemption, his full hopes for firm firmly fixed on the creation and nothingness.
Now, Schopenhauer, he's really, really nice, smiling guy, right? Schopenhauer biography gives no clue as to why he came to such convictions. He was raised in very comfortable circumstances. His health was robust called Bath every morning, including the morning on which he died, and he was not prone to depression.
As a 16-year-old, he visited French penal colonial Tulum, which would later be made famous by Victor Hugo's miserable. It became for him a metaphor for the world and its hopelessness each human, even the happiest, a miserable fellow prisoner. But why consider the penal colony as a window into the nature of life in the wider world rather than merely an extreme anomaly?
He crafted his pessimistic philosophy at the height of enlightenment, optimism. In the first decades of the 19th century when the likes of Hagel dominated German cultural scene, hagel and thinkers after him like Marx were not blind to violence and pain of the world, but their philosophies were all about the great, this worldly hopes Chappen Tower's main work.
The world as will and representation was all about lack of any worldly hope, whether social or personnel. Well, perhaps we should resist the impulse to search for some weighty reason for some great suffering, as in Job's case for shopping, Howard's aspiration to nothingness. However, it was that he personally became a pessimist, and regardless of the idiosyncratic and eclectic nature of his thought, I will argue that his rejection of the world is one example of a broader kind of malformed human desire and love that devalues and negates the world for a while.
Nobody paid Schopenhauer book any attention. Which confirmed his pessimism. Of course, Ford is so terrible that he doesn't want to know how terrible it is. Then the failed revolution of, uh, 1848 dubbed Springtimes of Na Springtime of Nations, came to the Books Rescue. The mood of cultural optimism was replaced by wintry fog of Velma, of melancholy and world weariness.
And 30 years after it was originally published, Schopenhauer books was thrust into cultural center stage. We too live in dystopian times, though the assessment is rather subjective. In my two post pandemic seminars, one of a cheery subject of suffering and the other on the equally cheery subject of pessimism.
I assigned Schopenhauer sections from Schopenhauer, uh, book for many students in the two seminars. This was the favorite reading. I suspect that is in part because Schopenhauer does not primarily bemoan horrendous suffering, though he does that too and does it very movingly. More significantly. He identifies something fundamental about the world that makes suffering of a more ordinary, kind, inevitable and explains why happiness is so hard to come by.
When cultural moods darken our attention focuses on that feature of the world. Everything then seems to be coming out of joint. The apocalypse apocalypse seems near. Circumstances can explain why Schopenhauer work neither receives warm reception or is disregarded either receives or attention or is disregarded circumstances his own and those of the world do not explore.
Uh, explain why he crafted his pessimistic philosophy. I suggested that what gave rise to his pessimism, to his outright hatred of the world was disappointed. Love for the world, more specifically specific and particular kind of love. In this lecture, I will first locate the root of Schopenhauer pessimism in a competitive love for the world and in the background expectation of abiding satisfaction, a position that distinguishes him for many contemporary pessimists who argue from the prevalence of suffering in the world.
After summarizing his proposal, um, proposed path over redemption, I will offer an appreciative but robust critique of his account of desire and satisfaction. And more importantly, I will connect it to key features of desire in contemporary culture. But first, I need to identify three different kinds of love that will be central to my argument in this lecture and in the lectures that follow.
Now love is a word with many meanings and without aspiring to a comprehensive typology of loves, I will sketch briefly three kinds of love and how they relate to one another. The lines of distinction between them are kind of blurry and one can bleed into another and can overlap with it. The three loves are Epit, themic, EPIT.
Toia means simply desire, epit, themic love or love as an appetite. Flowerless chocolate cake. I eat and it disappears. I love it so much. Erotic love or love as appreciation of the object, an agapic love or love as unconditional affirmation and care. Now the distinction between epit, themic and erotic love goes black to Plato, and I use the designation erotic roughly in his sense, rather than in restricted contemporary sense, referring primarily to sexual desire.
Agape love goes back to the Hebrew Bible and most notably to Jesus first is finite and material creatures of needs. We love with epit, themic love things that satisfy these needs. Once a need is satisfied, desire for what satisfy it ends and with it love. But it comes again and again with the in suppressible force of the essential condition of life with desire.
And ingest living things after we have prepared them for our meals. We desire and acquire things just to discard them. When we have done, when we are done with them, we desire and use other human beings to satisfy our needs. Untamed our epit. Themic love moves from object to object with open or hidden aggression toward each.
Moreover, as Socrates argues in Georgia's dialogue, Georgia's the jar that our appetite seeks to fill is leaky. If we are committed to filling out those jars or our jar, we are suffering extreme pain. He says, the pain of Epit, EPIT, themic lovers themselves is the least problem I think with Untamed Epit Theia.
What it does for the world, and that's where I'm gonna end this lecture is worst still, still epitome. Love is not bad. As such, it is the condition of our material and social life. Second, erotic love, its object. Do not merely satisfy our needs, but make rightful claim on our appreciation. Erotic love is a response to qualities, positive qualities of its objects.
We love them for what they are, not primarily for the benefit of relief from need which they provide. I will show that Chappen Tower has no place for such love, and that's one of the deepest problems as I see it in his thought. Now, the objects of epi, epit, theia, and error errors can be the same. The distinction, it is not in the object, but in how we approach it.
We can simply gulp down great wine to slake our thirst, or we can savor appreciate its exquisite aroma or flavor profile. The difference is not in the object of desire. The wine is the same, but in the character of our relation to that object. Now, interestingly enough, even God can be an object of an appetite.
As Luther noted, many love God the way life love their hosts, their sole aim being to suck God's blood. That's why I love Luther. He is so vivid in his descriptions when left to its own desires. Epitome love leaves di when left to its own devices. Epitome love leaves us alone, closed in a, in and ourselves erotic love in contrast opens up up to the world.
Setting us potentially on a journey to a greater good. Central to my argument will be the third kind of love, aga love, unlike Epi Tia. It is not about our need. Reaching out to objects in pursuit of satisfaction. Unlike arrows, it is not about pull exerted exerted on us by objects whose attractive qualities rightly claim our attention and our appreciation.
When we love with aga love, we don't primarily see our own. Seek our own good in the objects of our love, either the gratification of our needs by consuming and possessing them, or our delight and growth through appreciating the intrinsic value. Instead, we seek to bestow on the object of our love. A good irrespective of the state in which these objects happen to be reaff affirm the goodness of their sheer existence.
We considered, for instance, as Ki Kegar, uh, said that that the best thing about the Great King Solomon was not his wealth and kingly grandeur, but simply the particular human being that he was no different. Did any one of us agape love lovers, rejoice in the specific goodness of their beloveds creatureliness and go out of their way to care for them?
Agapic love is, can be sacrificial as the example of Jesus shows more characteristically, and essentially it is self decentering, though it's not self-denying. Those who love aga refuse to act as if they were the midpoint of their world, and instead place themselves with their appetites and qualities into the wider community of creatures.
They firm the other, the goodness of others' existence, and they seek the goods of others unconditionally with that wider community. Within that wider community, even the self can be object of such unconditional agapic love. Now, those are these three loves. All three loves are important, and in many ways they're compatible.
The central question for the character of our relation to the world is, which of them has pri, how are they ordered? Now we can say in the course of human development, consider from the perspective of the developing person Epit. Theia comes first. It also remains basic throughout our life. For the simple reasons that to live one must satisfy one's appetite.
That's why Potomac Club is largely independent of erotic and agapic gloves. But when given free range, though it tends to grow consciously with disastrous consequences, contoured by such love alone, our lives and our world are likely to be harmed and destroyed. We often forget though, that we also depend almost entirely on agapic love that welcomes us unconditionally into the world and affirms us as members of a shared world.
That's the point that is central to Hana, Aaron's, uh, understanding of amor Mundi. It is also agape love that makes us stay and care for a creature that has lost qualities that would rightly claim our appreciation. Very aged, for instance, or may have acquired qualities, which rightly trigger our condemnation and even our contempt qualities trigger contempt, not the people.
This and the fact that God loves the world above all, aga is why I argue that agape love should be have primacy in our relation to the world. Erotic love too is essential for it affirms and celebrates the intrinsic value of the qualities and entities that surround us and push us against treating creatures as mere means.
Now, back to grumpy au
in a chapter in the world, as well as representation two Second volume titled On The Nothingness and Suffering of Life, Schopenhauer Rights. If the evil were a hundredth time less in the world than is the case, the mere existence of evil would be still sufficient to ground the truth that we should. Be sorry rather than glad about the existence of the world, that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence, that it is something that fundamentally should not be.
It's pretty intense. How does shopper power arrive? Arrive at this extremely world condemning judgment. He often describes vividly horrendous sufferings that occur daily and to which all sentient beings are subjected. It was very early, uh, showed sensitivity to suffering of animals. For instance, their main source is actually human beings themselves.
That's because for each human, boundless egoism, he says, is the form of the will to life. His chief example of human egoism, perhaps even cruel malice, is black slavery, whose final purpose he writes. And, uh, whose spinal purpose was sugar and coffee. The torments can be inflicted on millions of human beings with no greater final purpose than to make sweetened afternoon tea.
A penny cheaper illustrates well sharpen car's account of the third horrors to which humans, along with all sentient being are exposed. The example of slavery may suggest that Chappen Hauer pessimism like that of many contemporary pessimists, rest on the judgment about relative quantities of pleasure and pain, but it does not.
An airtight argument for pessimism based on prevalence of pain over pleasure is, in fact not easy to make. It would have to assume wrongly. I think that individual experiences can be measured in something like units, uh, dollars, pains and head ons, and how many dollars and head-on, uh, are their experienced and then their value placed on a common scale.
If it did that, the result seems like people suggest, would then give us a hedonic pleasure value of life and therefore decide whether it's better to live or not to live, to exist or not, but while you of each experience and of a life as a whole depends on the evaluative frames which we bring to them, which in turn rest on operative vision of the chief.
Good. This is a point that RG Ziel made a more than a century ago. Now here's a thought. It is possible though, perhaps hard to imagine that one may consider a single subtle joy, like hearing the faint sound of oars in the silence as a row boat comes slowly out and goes back to be truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.
That's a quote from Jack Gilbert. I don't know whether you have it there. Um, at the end of his remarkable poem, a Brief for the Defense behind such judgment lies a robust anti head hedonist creed. That single joy overcomes all the pain. Chau Beau is aware that it is difficult to demonstrate pessimism from experience, which is why he seeks to demonstrate it a priority without reference to great suffering.
He offers argument from experiences many such he gives, uh, only as demonstrate confirmation of his demonstration. In fact, he maintains that one could remo remove all brutality from life and non-existence would still be preferable to existence. His advice to job at the height of his reputation with all his wealth intact.
In fact, in the middle of his merriment surrounded by his family and friends, he should walk out into the night and curse, and he should curse not just the day in which he was born, but even the best day of his life. Curse the world in which he lived and curse God who created it. How does Shop Hour make his case?
To answer the question I need to sketch impossibly briefly, the contours of his metaphysics. It derives from his idiosyncratic reading of Emmanuel Kant. Kant Argue to the the world as we know, it is only a representation fundamentally structured by our own human minds. The world itself, the or the thing itself, untouched by the structures of our cognition is beyond space, beyond time, outside reach of causality, and prior to any individuation, no individual.
If Schopenhauer took this one step further, the thing itself could be nothing else, but that same will we find in our decks. This will is at work in all things. It is the essence of the world. It is without cognition. It is blind striving without a goal. Everything in the world, everything that exists in time and space that individ that, that is individuate.
And then subject to laws of causality. Is the will made an object, the will filters through our conceptual apparatus in appearing to us as the world of object. As he puts it, the will fills all things, drives and strives in all things. Now, if you listen to this rather abstract summary of his, um, thought, and if you squint a bit, you can recognize in Shak Penha will a radically altered version of the God of classical theism.
He himself connects the two by invoking the news of the pre-Socratic philosopher and ris as the principle of existence. News or mind is the will guided by cognition. He contrasts. Contrast this with the account of Will as a blind urge to take, will guided by knowledge as the principle of existence is to give existence a ground and to commit oneself to optimism.
All fees should be optimists. That's basically what he's saying. To take blind will as the principle of existence, is to declare existence, to be groundless and commit oneself to pessimism. But then he asks if a knowing God existed, our chaotic world with all its miseries would not exist since our world exists.
If it does have a principle of existence, that principle must be blind, will the void. At the ground of existence left by the death of God. Who knows and loves is the ultimate reason why non-existence is to pre prefer to existence. This is the presupposition of Schopenhauer argument, but Chappen ER's argument itself consists in his description of the character of human desire, and that's the most interest for me here and or its relationship to satisfaction.
Okay, let's look what he says about desire describing human beings. Schopenhauer writes. Willing and striving constitute their entire existence fully comparable to an unquenchable thirst. Keep that in mind. Unquenchable thirst, but the basis of all willing is need, is lack, and thus pain, which is the will's primordial destiny by virtue of its essence.
If on the other hand, it lacks objects to will, its former objects having been quickly dispelled and too easily achieved. It is sized by terrible emptiness and boredom. Thus its life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom. In fact, these are the ingredients out of which it is ultimately composed.
Shopha seek to make. The unquenchable human tur, uh, uh, thirst is experientially plausible by identifying four features of human desire. First, all desires stems from lack, specifically a sort of lack experiences need. All desires are lack based, and none of them are object based. The category of intrinsically desirable, desirable objects is empty.
Nothing is intrinsically desirable. We call everything good that is just as we want it to be. We call bad everything that is not conducive to the striving of the will. That's what he claims. The objects are valuable to the extent that they're desired, and they're desired because of the lack, no sense of lack, no desire, and no value.
For sharpen hour desire is just episo me appetite, bereft of all errands, of identifying something to be appreciating that in what I desire. Second, all desiring suffering desiring is pay the struggle to bridge The gap between lack and satisfaction is always shadowed by the pa. Pain of lack, pain is exacerbated because the struggle is inhibited in many ways.
Above all because comp, there's competition with others, all of whom are boundlessly, egoistic, and many of whom are malicious boredom. Two, that often comes about after satisfaction is pain. A state or fearful life destroying longing without a definite object. Third. All satisfaction is negative. Third and more, most problematic as we'll see, uh, after, uh, all satisfaction is negative, absolutely never positive by negative sharpener means that satisfaction consists in mere absence of pain.
Pain is positive. We feel pain. We don't feel painlessness. We feel worry, but not freedom from worry. We feel fear, but we don't feel security satisfaction and the pleasure associated with it can never be anything. Then liberation from pain and from need. We never feel satisfaction and pleasure directly, but only as we remembered the suffering privation and per and that preceded them and ceased when they appeared.
And fourth, no satisfaction is lasting. Are you sleeping? Not yet. Okay. I don't need to wake you up. That's great.
Fourth, no satisfaction is lasting for one. Ultimate satisfaction is unachievable. It is no more possible for some satisfaction to stop the will from willing new things than it is for time to begin and end. Second. Any given satisfaction is ephemeral. Since satisfaction is not derived from the possession of the object of desire, but from filling the lack and cessation of need the moment lack ceases.
Satisfaction ceases as well. Satisfaction is always the beginning of either new striving or of boredom. Pain of lack and pain of boredom are the ingredients out of which life is ultimately composed. For Schopenhauer, the pleasure of satisfac pleasures of satisfaction are the lights of fireflies. In the night of life's suffering, these four claims taken together make pain the premortal, universal, and unalterable state of human lives.
Unquenchable thirst makes for ceaseless pain. This befits. Our nature as objectification of the ceaseless and aimless will at the heart of reality, as interruptions in the primordial state of faith, play pain. All satisfactions are secondary, entirely effects of the temporary relief from pain. Pain is a condition of any pleasure.
Experiences of pleasure do little to lessen it. Even the highest pleasure is merely absence of pain and therefore worth at best. Zero. You never go beyond zero. You're always below it or, or maybe at the zero. This is why far from being a gift a life like our own to which ontological lack is basic, is an unpayable debt contracted by birth.
The unalterably and predominantly negative hedonic states of all humans are. For Schopenhauer a hedonist. The main reason why non-existence is better than existence. Positive hedonic states would, for him be a genuine reason to love the world. But since his love for the world is exclusively epit theia, it is no sufficient reason to abide.
Except in rare cases of genuine com compassion, which is a fern by shoffen hower, but we don't know how it fits into his whole system, except in cases of genuine compassion. We relate to everything as mere means to slake or unquenchable thirst. No object of desire has any value in and of itself. The value of each is indexed to the capacity to feel the lack.
Even if something had intrinsic value, it could not matter to us as intrinsically valuable because the only motivation that we have, only motivational relation we could possibly have to, to it would be a fruit of our lack. There's no space in sharpen tower's view of the world's for erotic love. Given his metaphysics of blind will, no desire can elevate itself into loving things through the good they may be in themselves.
Egoism is both boundless and colossal. Towering over the world. Humans in the world are not fit for each other. Audio mode. The hatred of the world seems an appropriate general stance toward the world of the one for whom everything is means, but nothing satisfies. The worst in the Bible, Schopenhauer hated the most is the one reporting God's assessment of the world.
At the end of Genesis one, God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good. I will return, it'll be my key verse in lecture, uh, lecture four, but for Chau, this is the worst possible verse in the Bible, God creates. One, timely and for his own pleasure, the world of distress and misery, and then even applauds himself with everything was very good to god's.
Everything is good. Schopenhauer response, nothing is good. The cost of rejecting the world's original goodness and recognizing only epit. Theia is the alt, is the source for ultimate rejection of the world, as means to an end, far from being deeply meaningful gifts to each other. As I will argue in lecture four, human beings driven by un, the unquenchable appetite are mainly competitors in each potential prey.
Schopenhauer has a remedy for this situation, believe it or not. A redemption of source. So here it is. One might think that world without any positive value would be a world without moral meaning not chau. He insists that the world must have moral meaning In the monnet tradition, God the creator and redeemer is granter and granter of world's, meaning Schopenhauer rejects God, but retains one of God's most important functions.
One which Nie will insist is irretrievably lost with the death of God. That is of arranging the world with salvation in view. What is the meaning of the world? History shopper Tower denies outright one, meaning we Western as generally, especially in modern modernity, tend to embrace. There is only one innate error, and it is that we exist to be happy.
He writes that in an essay titled The Way to Salvation. In a sense, the error coincides with our existence itself, where we are nothing but the will to life, and what we think under the concept of happiness is successive satisfaction of all our willing. It turns out though, that everything in life is suited to the task of bringing us back from that original error and convincing us that the goal of our existence is not to be happy.
More precisely the goal of our existence in the world of time and space and individuation is to suffer. To undergo a cleansing process whose purifying fire is pain. The pain gives birth to the inside, that non-existence would be preferable to existence. This insight become then for him, moral conviction that the world ought not to be, that we should want its non-existence.
The two together, the insight and the conviction then nudged the will cured of craving for pleasure for life itself to turn away from the world. The purpose of the world's evil then is to push us beyond the world into a certain kind of nothingness. The world's meaning is radically ace. To those who see the world as good or who live within the horizon of progress.
Schopenhauer appears as a night of death, void of hope, which is how Nietzsche describes him if he give up on progress. However, we see that the grand, non worldly hope and art, temporal hope, animates chop power. It is not a positive hope for life in God, as in some strands of Christian tradition, but negative hope for nothingness.
Granted, it is not an absolute nothingness, but a relative kind of Nazi, and that is to say nothing of the kind that we can imagine and understand, and therefore denial of this world rather than positive something, some nothing that actually exists as nothing, which would be contradiction in terms. Now two paths lead to nothingness.
One is exceptional and consists in deep compassion by letting us feel the full weight of the immense suffering of the world. Compassion pushes us away from the world. The other, and by far most prevalent, pat, is the experience of personal suffering, which breaks the will to life. As for Augustine, the world, this means to find fulfillment in God in so in much more pessimistic way.
For sharpen Hower, the world appears as nothing more than a means for its own self consolation for human nevan redemption. Now that's Chop Auer, and that's the effect of his account of desire as Epit, Theia as, um, a competitive love. Earlier I noted that Chop Beau's argument for this value of existence depends on his account of desire and satisfaction.
It is time to identify inadequacies or to show how close and to show how closely contemporary forms of desire largely shaped by impersonal material and economic forces, how close they track to his account of desire. Unsurprisingly, late modern desire generates similar, lest intense, and mostly unacknowledged world negating stances.
Now, I want you to be awake for, for what comes next, because that's gonna shake us little bit in our, our own boots. Maybe too much you'll tell me afterwards. I will first note two areas where Schopenhauer is mistaken, but where hardly anyone in late modernity has followed him. I will then point out to some overlaps between shop Schopenhauer and late modern Desire.
And finally, and by noting some unique feature of desire in late modernity, the point of all will be that modern desire is world denying and negating first among the least plausible claims in Chappen house's analysis is the relation between desire and satisfaction. Um, that satisfaction is never more than anything, but, uh, never more than absence of pain.
We can all think of many places, many things, uh, instances where we have satisfaction without preceding pain In the republic, Plato discusses pleasures that do not come out of pains, cases in which the cessation of pain is not a condition of pleasure. The pleasure of smell can become very intense. For instance, he claims without being preceded by pain, and when they seize those pleasures, leaving no pain behind.
The same can be said of the pleasure of all other senses and the pleasure of knowledge as well. Even when relief from suffering is part of the pleasure, pleasure often exceeds anything required for mere relief. Consider example of joy, a pleasant emotion rather than a pleasant sensation. Uh, like smell, children are squealing in delight as they run to spring through sprinklers.
On a hot day, a summer heat is uncomfortable, but mildly so the children have been happily playing outside before the sprinklers were turned on. Their delight is more than the pleasure of relief from heat. Consider now their parents experience observing them from menin. A cool room delighted before the sprinklers came on, and pure joy after no pain here as the backdrop of delight and joy.
Second for Schopenhauer, the only adequate satisfaction is the kind after which no new willing follows. Such understanding of satisfaction is an undigested residue of in his system, of the promise of satisfaction in timeless eternity associated with classical theism, in effect for sharpen power and for shopper power in intention, this amount to denial of temporality of human beings.
Once all desires are permanently satisfied, you kind of aren't anymore because temporal sequencing and desires are, I think, structural element of our being. As a temporal beings, human pleasures are not hindered, but constituted by their temporality. Say the joy of hearing BS mass in B minor, I love that piece, is that it has a beginning and it has an ending, and that after listening to the first period in its overture, a new willing of the same joy can follow, especially in as every new listening is pleasurable in a different.
Kind of way, slightly different, but nonetheless different way. Whether resistance to new desires come from atheist philosophers like Schopenhauer, or from theistic hopes in life in timeless eternity. It amounts to nihilism or in theological terms to decre. Because there are now two aspects of Schopenhauer account of desire we may reject theoretically, but which tend to shape profoundly how we live upon reflection, we are likely to resist the idea that no, that desire is simply to seek to feel a lack.
That was Auer argument. Another example, a 3-year-old girl is on a walk and sees a tree and runs to hug it. She may be merely satisfying preexisting thirst to hug and be hugged for which the rough barked tree then becomes an improbable object until she learns a little bit better, more likely. Some feature of that tree generates desire in the child to hug it.
If we spiritually train ourselves to be open to the intrinsic value of things, say, to be open to the intrinsic value of that faint sound of oars in the silence, in the stillness of the night sea, uh, as a robot comes slowly out into the harbor and back in, out from the harbor and back in, they'll act on us.
That sound of those oars, that tree or whatever that might be, will act on us and that, and we will respond, uh, recognizing the value. Auer must be wrong about Epit. Theia exclusively lack feeling character of all desires. And yet, and yet, in the way we live, mostly we prove him right. Whether we love ice cream or sex or God, we are often merely sle seeking to slake our thirst.
Epi love has largely colonized erotic love. Second au insist on the fleetingness of all satisfaction. The epitome character of love makes satisfaction, uh, disappear with possession. You desire something, you have it. No more desire. Perhaps, but we don't live simply in isolated moments of the present. We live in an extended present, overlaid by past, which inhabits it and the future, which we anticipate and is also there.
The delights of both anticipation and fulfillment can linger on, but though they can linger, they mostly don't. In comparison with traditional cultures in late modernity, the problem of fleetingness has become more acute pressed upon us by forces over which we have little control, new object of objects of desire, call on us from all sides at once, making it hard to rest with the good that we possess.
The very possibility of the new and better becomes the enemy of the old and good contrast. The fleetingness of satisfaction bemoaned by Schopenhauer and experienced by us moderns daily to the experience of those souls in Dante's Paradiso who dwell or in the lower rank. In paradox, Dante wonders, how can they be content while enjoying only lesser paradis goods?
They respond. The souls. We long for what we have. If we long for what we have, what we have never ceases to satisfy. If we despise what we have because we could have something better or because others have something better, we will never be satisfied. Never love any object, never love the world. But how is it possible to resist the erosion of value brought about comparative judgments and passage of time?
The miracle can happen if our erotic and agapic love take upper hand. Erotic love will give us the capacity to respond to the pool of the good that we already have and to delight in it. Agape Club will enable us to affirm what we have, even when it has lost some of its goodness. It'll motivate us to seek, to restore it to its native glory.
We moderns part ways which Hoppen Hower most decidedly in having abandoned the ideal of satisfaction upon which no new satisfaction and no new desires follow rather than desiring to any desire we desire to desire. A stands toward the world that also nie embraces. As I will explain in lecture three, we pursue both the joy of desiring itself and the rush of coming to possess the object of our desire.
However, fleeting the rush may turn out to. The intensity of desiring to desire stimulated by competitive environments can be so fierce that it creates a delusion of reality shaped around our own desires as they dismissed rise describing life in Manhattan. She continues and reality shaped around your own desires.
There is something sociopathic about that ambition we see here at work, some of the egoism that Auer saw towering over the world, a self-absorption which will curse reality if it refuses to accommodate to our desire. Now, consider second that our satisfactions follow one after another in ever quicker success.
Though we act on desires that we experience as if they were deeply our own. Most of them are not native to our ever hungry flesh. They are invasive transplants. Neither are they simply desires of our eyes. It is not that we see what is out there and feel the thirst for it. Not simply that an alien force with immense power of seduction keeps subliminally planting desire into our flesh.
This is largely because what we desire is mediated through competitive markets whose vital interest is qualification and intensification of our desires. In fact, because of those same interests, many objects of desire are designed such that they would quickly become inadequate, obsolete. Mere desired, and not specifically not to be abiding love.
Quick example of somebody who doesn't know what he's talking right now is fast fashion.
The most through most human history. The dynamic of desire and satisfaction followed a schema, desire, a satisfaction, dissatisfaction, desire, a, the same desires were satisfied by the same kinds of object. And then in more or less, the same form. The schema is, it's like, like my breakfast, exactly the same breakfast every single morning.
The schema of late modernity is desire A, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, desire, b. Putting it this way though, correct. Leaves out two crucial elements. One is that dissatisfaction often troubles any satisfaction because we are aware of multiple competing BS while we are desiring and enjoying a distraction is not just fleeting, but already unsatisfying as desire itself is internally divided.
More importantly, modern desire is not about attachment to worldly goods, which is what classical tradition, Christian tradition, uh, was troubled about. Attachment is unwanted because it would hinder the movement of desire to new and better objects. We act, we actually reject object A, deeming it inadequate, and replace it with object B, which we hope will be better.
True. Sometimes new replaces the used up and the better replaces what is actually bad. Often though the condition of the object, which we reject is irrelevant. It simply ceases us to satisfy us. We get bored with it. It is also no longer in style. A better version is available for whatever reason, it is not good enough.
And we discarded almost all the countless such shifts from one object of desire to new one that occur daily. In consumer societies are micro rejections of the world. Together they amount to massive garbage Inc. Of the world. Masquerading often is love for what isn't yet. Powers such denigration of what is, is constitutive of much of the modern, predominantly epitome relation to the world.
To conclude this. In this lecture, I distinguish three kinds of love, epit Toia that prioritizes the need of the lover, errors that appreciates the good qualities of the beloved agape that unconditionally stands by the beloved, often in empirically or with which often finds itself in apparently unlovable states.
Auer pessimism I've argued stems from his disappointed epit. Themic love the world, it turns out is not organized simply to meet his needs. Today, I believe we unthinkingly share much of this orientation relating to the world only through the lens of our own increasing needs, which are often subtly imposed on us.
We experience as deeply our own. Schopenhauer time as today, Tia that love, that kind of love for the world, um, is mainly self-regarding and sometimes egoistic search for satisfaction of desire is in fact enacted denigration of what is of the world. Epitome lovers experience themselves as their own soul, purpose as their own goal.
The very act of an earth link relating to oneself as a sole purpose degrades to means everything that exists the entire nature. Hannah Arendt noted, she continued. It is not possible to push further deification of the world. It's Vulgarization. I wish you all a very happy evening
Evan Rosa: for the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Miroslav Volf. Production Assistance by Taylor Craig, and Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show for more information. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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