UMBERTO GALIMBERTI - SCHOPENHAUER e il PESSIMISMO

Summary

The lecture presents Arthur Schopenhauer as a philosopher who was largely ignored during his own time but became influential later. He described himself as writing for posterity. His major work, The World as Will and Representation, initially received little attention, while the shorter, more accessible essays and aphorisms of Parerga and Paralipomena eventually brought him recognition.

Representation and the limits of reason

• Schopenhauer argues that we do not know the world directly as it is in itself. We know it as it appears through our minds: as representation.
• The lecture traces this shift away from “naive realism”—the belief that our thoughts simply reproduce reality—to Descartes and Kant. Scientific inquiry, in this account, tests nature through hypotheses and experiments rather than merely observing it.
• Schopenhauer adopts Kant’s distinction between the world as it appears to us and the unknowable “thing in itself.” But he proposes that we can glimpse what lies beneath appearances through our own embodied experience.
• He rejects Hegel’s confidence that reality and reason ultimately coincide. The world, he argues, is not fundamentally governed by rational purpose.

The will, the body, and human motivation

• Beneath representation is the will: an impersonal, irrational force that drives nature and living beings. It has no final goal; it continually produces and renews life.
• The self’s conscious plans, ideals, and explanations are not the deepest causes of our actions. Schopenhauer’s stark claim is that we are not fully “masters in our own house.”
• The body is central because it reveals this underlying force through needs and desires. People may describe their actions as guided by reason or ideals, but the lecture says Schopenhauer sees them as substantially shaped by bodily drives.
• The will operates at the level of the species as well as the individual. Sexual desire, for example, can lead people to reproduce in ways that serve the continuation of the species, even when doing so brings personal cost.
• Desire is rooted in lack: we want what we do not have. Satisfying one desire does not end the process; it gives way to another. The result is a cycle of striving and pain. When striving temporarily stops, boredom takes its place. The lecture sums this up with Schopenhauer’s remark that six days of the week bring toil and pain, while the seventh brings boredom.

Social values and morality

• Schopenhauer treats many ideals and values as human constructions that help communities live together, rather than as truths handed down from beyond the world.
• He is skeptical of morality as a system of duties that can govern people simply because they “ought” to act in a certain way. The lecture contrasts such ideals with the more basic, often unconscious forces that shape human life.

Routes away from suffering

The lecture describes three responses Schopenhauer proposes to the dominance of the will:

• Compassion: Recognize that suffering is not unique to oneself; it is shared across living beings and arises from the same underlying conditions. Compassion is presented as more than pity or a temporary charitable gesture.
• Art: Contemplating art can offer a temporary release from ordinary desire, personal interest, possession, and the usual concerns of time and space.
• Asceticism and sexual abstinence: Renouncing desire, especially sexual desire, is presented as the strongest attempt to resist the will’s drive to reproduce and continue its activity.

The lecture also stresses that suicide is not liberation in Schopenhauer’s view. The person who dies by suicide does not necessarily reject life itself, but may reject the particular conditions of their life.

Influence and later interpretations

• Nietzsche regarded Schopenhauer as an important early influence, but ultimately offered a different response. Rather than renouncing the irrational forces of life, Nietzsche embraces the Dionysian, creative side of existence and treats illusions, masks, and self-deception as possible means of endurance.
• Freud acknowledged Schopenhauer’s anticipation of ideas central to psychoanalysis, especially the importance of bodily drives, sexuality, aggression, and unconscious motivation. The lecture distinguishes them by suggesting that Freud developed ways to manage or “colonize” the unconscious through the ego and the superego.
• Horkheimer is presented as criticizing Freud’s reality principle as a form of instrumental reason: a demand to accept and adapt to what exists, which risks leading back to resignation.
• Schopenhauer’s influence extended into literature, philosophy, and music. The lecture names Thomas Mann, Wagner, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein among those shaped by or associated with his work.
• The closing portrait presents Schopenhauer as a metaphysician, a gifted writer, and a polemicist. His pessimistic account of life became influential in European culture, even though its central conclusion—that the will can only be quieted through renunciation—was not shared by every later thinker.

Speakers and sources featured

Speaker: Umberto Galimberti, delivering the lecture.

Thinkers, writers, and other figures discussed or cited: Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Plato, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Friedrich Schlegel, Petrarch, Galileo Galilei, Evangelista Torricelli, Giordano Bruno, Karl Jaspers, Saint Paul, John Paul II, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Giacomo Leopardi, Blaise Pascal, Max Horkheimer, Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.