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 theist or atheist or anything in between.
A world of beauty and the world of ugliness, world of goodness and of horrors.
Now I want to present an atheist case that we ought not love the world, but actually hate it.
The case rests on an account of human desire.
Desire as appetite. In the last lecture I use it,
I used chocolate, my love for chocolate flour, flourless chocolate cake to illustrate that kind of desire.
Now, whether we are atheists like Schopenhauer or not,
many of us are relating to the world with the same kind of chocolate cake desire, but we end up
actually, this will be my argument, hating the world whether we intend so or not.
Above all, this kind of critique, this is not,
there will not be a critique of Schopenhauer only, but of the desire to dominate 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're absolutely not interested in Schopenhauer and 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.
Marauding bands of 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, 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 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 sceptical, maybe rightly sceptical, wife.
But then his friends came to visit. Sitting for seven days in silence and mourning as they observe the ruin of a great man.
Or were they secretly gloating as well?
Job saw himself through their eyes, and then he opened his mouth.
And he cursed. Job did not curse God, though he came a hair's breadth from letting Satan win the bet.
Instead, Job cursed the 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 its stars 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 anodyne existence in Hades,
but at least he would have been there where wicked ceased from troubling and weary are at rest.
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 a definition of pessimism. He was also a pessimist of redemption.
His own hope for himself reduced to an untroubled semi existence.
Great an inexplicable suffering made pessimist of Job for a while.
We don't know what made the pessimist of Schopenhauer for life and more extreme one than Job was even a Job's lowest point.
As for suffering, Schopenhauer considered it endemic to existence itself.
As for redemption, his hopes were firmly fixed on de creation and nothingness.
Now Schopenhauer's. He's really, really nice. Smiley guy, right?
Schopenhauer's biography gives no clue as to why he came to such convictions.
He was raised in very comfortable circumstances. His health was robust.
Cold baths 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 colony in Toulon, which would later be made famous by Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.
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 Hegel dominated German cultural scene.
Hegel and thinkers after him, like Marx, were not blind to violence and pain of the world.
But their philosophies were all about that the great, this-worldly hopes. Schopenhauer's main work, 'The World as Will and Representation'
was all about lack of any worldly hope, whether social or personal.
But perhaps we should resist the impulse to search for some weighty reason for some great suffering,
as in Job's case for Schopenhauer'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's book any attention, which confirmed his pessimism,
of course, for it is so terrible that it doesn't want to know how terrible it is.
Then the failed revolution of 1848, dubbed spring Times of, Springtime of Nations, came to the book's rescue.
The mood of cultural optimism was replaced by wintry fog of Weltschmerz of melancholy and world weariness.
And 30 years after it was originally published, Schopenhauer's book was thrust into cultural centre 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's sections from Schopenhauer's book.
For many students in the two seminars, this was the favourite 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 help explain why Schopenhauer work neither receives warm reception or disregard either receives or attention, or is disregarded.
Circumstances, his own and those of the world, do not explore,
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.
Appetitive love. In this lecture, I will first locate the root of Schopenhauer's pessimism in appetitive love
for the world and in the background expectation of abiding satisfaction,
a position that distinguishes him from many contemporary pessimists who argue from the prevalence of suffering in the world.
After summarising his proposal, um proposed path toward 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 topology of love,
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 epithumic -
Epithumia means simply desire, epithumic love is an appetite.
Flourless chocolate cake I eat and it disappears.
I love it so much. Erotic love or love as appreciation of the object and agapic love or love is unconditional love,
affirmation and care. Now the distinction between epithumic and erotic love goes back to Plato,
and I use the designation erotic roughly in his sense rather than in restricted contemporary sense, referring primarily to sexual desire.
Agapic love goes back to the Hebrew Bible and most notably to Jesus.
First as finite and material creatures of needs,
we love with epithumic love things that satisfy these needs.
Once the need is satisfied, desire for what satisfied it ends, and with it love.
But it comes again and again with the in suppressive force of the essential condition of life.
We 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 epithumic love moves from object to object with open or hidden aggression toward each.
Moreover, as Socrates argues in Gorgias dialogue, Gorgias, the jar that our appetite seeks to fill is leaky.
If we are committed to filling our those jars or our jar, we are suffering extreme pain.
He says the pain of epithumic lovers themselves, is the least problem, I think, with untamed epithumia.
What it does for the world and that's where I'm going to endt
this lecture is worse still, still epithumic
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 object.
We love them for what they ar,e not primarily for the benefit of relief from need which they provide.
I will show the Schopenhauer 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 the epithumia and Eros can be the same.
The distinction 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 savour appreciate its exquisite aroma or flavour 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 lice
love their hosts. Their sole aim being to suck God's blood.
That's why I love Luther. He's so vivid in his description.
When left to his own desires epithumic love leaves us alone,
closed in on ourselves. Erotic love, in contrast, opens up, up to the world, setting us potentially on the journey to a greater good.
Central to my argument will be the third kind of love agapic love.
Unlike a epithumia, it is not about our need reaching out to objects in pursuit of satisfaction.
Unlike Eros, 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 agapic love, we don't primarily see or 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 their 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.
We affirm the goodness of their sheer existence.
We considered, for instance, as Kierkegaard said,
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 than any one of us. Agapic love,
lovers, rejoice in the specific goodness of their beloved's creatureliness and go out of their way to care for them.
Agapic love can be sacrificial, as the example of Jesus shows - more characteristically and essentially it is self decentring.
Though it's not self denying. Those who love agapically refused to act as if they were the midpoint of their world,
and instead placed themselves with their appetites and qualities into the wider community of creatures.
They affirm the other, the goodness of others existence, and they seek the good 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 promise?
How are they ordered? Now we can say in the course of human development, consider from the perspective of the developing person,
epithumia comes first. It also remains basic throughout our life.
For the simple reason that to live, one must satisfy one's appetite.
That's why epithumic love is largely independent of erotic and agapic loves.
But when given free range, though, it tends to grow cancerously 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 Hannah Arendt's, uh, understanding of amor mundi.
It is also agapic 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
agapically is why I argue that agapic love should 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 Schopenhauer.
In a chapter in the World as Will and Representation, second volume titled “On the Nothingness and Suffering of Life,”
Schopenhauer writes, if the evil were a hundred times 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 Schopenhauer arrive at this extremely world condemning judgement.
He often describes vividly horrendous sufferings that occur daily and to which all sentient beings are subjected.
It was very early 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 whose final 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 Schopenhauer's account of the surd horrors to which humans, along with all sentient being, are exposed.
The example of slavery may suggest that Schopenhauer's pessimism, like that of many contemporary pessimists,
rests on the judgement 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,
dolars and hedons, pains, and how many dolars and hedons are there experienced and then their value placed on a common scale?
If it did that, the result, seems like people suggest, would then give us 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 Georg Simmel made 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 rowboat 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.
Uh, at the end of his remarkable poem, "A Brief for the Defense."
Behind such judgement lies a robust anti head hedonist creed, that single joy
overcomes all the pain. Schopenhauer is aware that it is difficult to demonstrate pessimism from experience,
which is why he seeks to demonstrate it a priori without reference to great suffering.
He offers argument from experiences many such he gives only as demonstrate confirmation of his demonstration.
In fact, he maintains that one could 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 Schopenhauer 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 Immanuel Kant.
Kant argued that the world as we know it is only a representation fundamentally structured by our own human mind.
The world itself, 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. Schopenhauertook this one step further.
The thing itself could be nothing else but that same will we find in our depths.
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 is, that is individuated and subject to laws of causality,
is the will made an object, the will filtered through our conceptual apparatus and 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 thought, and if you squint a bit,
you can recognise in Schopenhauer's will a radically altered version of the god of classical theism.
He himself connects the two by invoking the nous of the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras,
as the principle of existence nous of mind is the will guided by cognition.
Schopenhauer contrasts 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 theists should be optimists. That's basically what he is 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 adds, 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 be preferred to existence.
This is the presupposition of
Schopenhauer's argument, but Schopenhauer's argument itself consists in his description of the character of human desire.
And that's most interest for me here and there, 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 world'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 seized by a 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.
Schopenhauer seeks to make the unquenchable human thirst as experientially plausible by identifying four features of human desire.
First, all desires stems from lack, specifically, a sort of lack experienced as 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 Schopenhauer desire is just epithumia.
Appetite bereft of all eros, of identifying something, to be appreciating
in what I desire. Second, all desiring, suffering, desiring is pain.
The struggle to bridge the gap between lack and satisfaction is always shadow by the pain of lack.
Pain is exacerbated because the struggle is inhibited in many ways, above all,
because there's competition with others, all of whom are boundlessly egoistic and many of whom are malicious.
Boredom too 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. All satisfaction is negative.
Absolutely never positive. By negative
Schopenhauer 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.
But satisfaction and the pleasure associated with it can never be anything
than liberation from pain and from need.
We never feel satisfaction and pleasure directly,
but only as we remember the suffering, privation 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 feeling 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 satisfaction,
pleasures 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.
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, 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 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, is 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 epithumia,
it is no sufficient reason to abide except in rare cases of genuine compassion, which is affirmed Schopenhauer
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 our
unquenchable thirst. No object of desire has any value in and of itself.
The value of each is index 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 fruit of our lack.
There's no space in Schopenhauer's view of the world for erotic love.
Given his metaphysics of blind will, no desire can elevate itself into loving things for the good they may be in themselves.
Egoism is both boundless and colossal, towering over the world.
Humans and the world are not fit for each other.
Odium mundi, 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 thing 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 - this will be my key verse in lecture, uh, lecture four but for Schopenhauer,
this is the worst possible verse 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 recognising only epithumia
is the source for ultimate rejection of the world as a means to an end.
Far from being deeply meaningful gifts to each other
as I will argue in lecture four human beings driven by unquenchable appetite are mainly competitors and each potential prey.
Schopenhauer has a remedy for this situation, believe it or not, a redemption of sorts.
So here it is. One might think that the world without any positive value would be a world without moral meaning.
Not Schopenhauer. He insists that the world must have moral meaning.
In the monotheists tradition, God the Creator and redeemer is granter and guarantor of world's meaning.
Schopenhauer rejects God but retains one of God's most important functions,
one which Nietzsche 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. Schopenhauer denies outright one meaning we
Westerns generally, especially in modern modernity, tend to embrace.
There's 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, or 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 insight that non-existence would be preferable to existence.
This insight becomes 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 nudge the will cured of craving for pleasure, for life itself
to turn away from the world. The purpose of the world's woe then, is to push us beyond the world into a certain kind of nothingness.
The world's meaning is radically ascetic. To those who see the world as good, or who live within the horizon of progress.
Schopenhauer appears as a knight of death, void of hope, which is how Nietzsche describes him.
If he gave up on progress, however, we see that the grand non-worldly hope and a temporal hope animates Schopenhauer.
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 nothingness
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 a 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 the most prevalent path, is the experience of personal suffering, which breaks the will to life/
As for Augustine, the world is means to find fulfilment in God in so in much more pessimistic way,
for Schopenhauer the world appears as nothing more than the means for its own self consolation for human nirvanic, redemption.
Now that's Schopenhauer. And that's the effect of his account of desire, as epithumia as, um, appetitive love.
Earlier, I noted that Schopenhauer's argument for this value of existence depends on his account of desire and satisfaction.
It's 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, though less intense and mostly unequal and unacknowledged world negating stances.
Now I want you to be awake for for what comes next, because that's going to shake us a little bit in 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 sharp Schopenhauer and late Modern Desire,
and finally end 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 Schopenhauer's analysis is the relation between desire and satisfaction.
Um, that satisfaction is never more than anything, but 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 like smell.
Children are squealing in delight as they run to sprint through sprinklers on a hot day.
A summer heat is uncomfortable, but mildly so.
The children had 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 within 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 Schopenhauer and for Schopenhauer in intention, this amount to denial of temporality of human beings.
Once all desires are permanently satisfied, you kind of aren't any more because temporal sequencing and desires, I think,
structural element of our being as temporal beings,
human pleasures are not hindered but constituted by their temporality, say the joy of hearing Bach's 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 kyrie in its overture, a new building 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 decreation.
Consider now, there are now two aspects of Schopenhauer's 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 is Schopenhauer's argument.
Another example. A three year old girl is on the walk and sees a tree and runs to hug it.
She may be merely satisfying the pre-existing 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, as a rowboat comes slowly out into the harbour and back in, out from the harbour and back in.
They will 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, recognising the value.
Schopenhauer must be wrong about epithumia - 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 seeking to slake our thirst.
Epithumic love has largely colonised erotic love.
Second, Schopenhauer insists on the fleeting ness of all satisfaction.
The epithumic character of love makes satisfaction 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 fulfilment 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 in the lower rank in Paradise.
Dante wonders how can they be content while enjoying only lesser
paradisiacal 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 judgements and passage of time?
The miracle can happen.
If our erotic and agapic love take up her hand,
erotic love will give us the capacity to respond to the pull of the good that we already have, and to delight in it.
Agapic love will enable us to affirm what we have, even when it has lost some of its goodness.
It will motivate us to seek to restore it to its native glory.
We moderns part ways
with Schopenhauer most decidedly in having abandoned the ideal of satisfaction upon which no new satisfaction and no new desires follow.
Rather than desiring to end desire, we desire to desire- a stance toward the world that also Nietzsche 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 be.
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 Zadie Smith writes describing life in Manhattan, she continues, in reality shaped around your own desires.
There is something sociopathic about that ambition.
We see her here at work. Some of the egoism that Schopenhauer saw towering over the world,
a self-absorption which will curse reality if it refuses to accommodate to our desire.
Now consider second. Did our satisfactions follow one after another in ever quicker succession?
Though we act on desires that we experience as if they were deeply our own,
most of them are not native to our ever hungering 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 proliferation 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, to be merely epithumically, desired, and not specifically not to be abiding loved.
Quick example of somebody who doesn't know what he's talking right now is fast fashion.
Though most through most human history, the dynamic of desire and satisfaction followed a schema.
These are a satisfaction. Dissatisfaction.
Desire a. The same desires were satisfied by the same kinds of object, and then return in more or less the same form.
The schema is like, like my breakfast. Exactly the same breakfast every single morning.
The schema of late modernity is desire a satisfaction.
Dissatisfaction b. Putting it this way, though correct leaves out two crucial elements.
One is that dis-satisfaction often troubles any satisfaction because we are aware of multiple
competing B's while we are desiring and enjoying A. Satisfaction is not just fleeting,
but already unsatisfying is desire itself is internally divided.
More importantly, modern desire is not about attachment to worldly goods, which is what classical tradition, Christian tradition was troubled about.
Attachment is unwanted because it would hinder the movement of desire to new and better object.
What 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 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 discard it. Almost all the countless such shifts from one object of desire to new one that occurred daily in consumer societies,
are micro rejections of the world.
Together they amount to massive garbaging
of the world masquerading often as love for what isn't yet ours.
Such denigration of what is is constitutive of much of the modern, predominantly epithumic relation to the world.
To conclude. In this lecture, I distinguish three kinds of love - epithumia that prioritises the need of the lover,
eros that appreciates the good qualities of the beloved,
agapic that unconditionally stands by the beloved often and apparently, which often finds itself in apparently unlovable states.
Schopenhauer's pessimism, I've argued, stems from his dissappointed epithumic love.
The world, it turns out, is not organised 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 often subtly imposed on us we experience as deeply our own. In Schopenhauer's time,
as today epithumia, 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.
Epithumic lovers experience themselves as their own
sole purpose is their own goal.
The very act of an Earthling 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 de-deification of the world.
Its 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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