The Metaphysical Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer with Bernardo Kastrup #GJWMotivation #GJWpsycholo

Thinking Allowed, conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery, with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today, we'll be exploring the metaphysical philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the great philosophers of the 19th century. My guest is Bernardo Kastrup, who is probably the foremost philosopher today articulating an idealistic metaphysical position in philosophy. His newest book is Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics, the Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics. Bernardo has written many other books articulating his philosophy and we've conducted interviews about those books on this channel. They include Rationalist Spirituality, an Exploration of the Meaning of Life and Existence Informed by Logic and Science, Meaning in Absurdity, What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us About the Nature of Reality, Dreamed-Up Reality, Diving into the Mind to Uncover the Astonishing Tale of Nature, Why Materialism is Baloney, How True Skeptics Know There is No Death, and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything, Brief Peaks Beyond, philosophical essays on metaphysics, neuroscience, free will, skepticism and culture. More than allegory on religious myth, truth and belief, and the idea of the world, a multidisciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. As always with Bernardo, this is an internet interview and now I will switch over to the internet video. Welcome, Bernardo. It's a pleasure to be with you once again. Always a lot of fun to talk to you, Jeff. Yes, it's been a while and I know from our previous conversations that Arthur Schopenhauer is dear to your heart. He's probably the single philosopher with whom you feel the greatest affinity. Definitely. Intellectual affinity, the most with Schopenhauer. In terms of intellectual affinity, there are some other candidates. But in terms of intellectual outlook, conclusions, philosophical position, definitely Schopenhauer. Yeah, by far. Schopenhauer died, what, 150 years ago, 160 years ago. I think so. He lived in a different era completely. I guess in his writings he was largely, of course, responding to the other great philosophical thinkers of his era, particularly Hegel and Kant. That's right. He was with Kant and very much against Hegel. Maybe not necessarily because of philosophical positions of Hegel, some of them surely, but he just disliked the guts of Hegel, I think. He thought Hegel was pretentious and complicated things unnecessarily, which is probably true. His main disagreement with Hegel, from what little I know, because I'm not a philosopher, is that Hegel postulated a rational universe and Schopenhauer is basically saying that the essence of the universe is what he called will and it wasn't rational. In fact, he described it as blind. That's right. Hegel's absolute ideal, and both are idealists, Hegel thought that the universal mind behind everything that's going on was metacognitive, deliberate, rational, pondered things. And Schopenhauer thought that the mind that underlies all nature is instinctive. It is not rational. It's emotionally driven. Its will and the choice of this word already implies that the character of that mind is volitional. It's not objective. It's driven by passion. And that was a main point of disagreement with Hegel. Because for Schopenhauer, if you look at nature, animal eating animal, torture happening every day in our backyards, inside the grass, ants killing earthworms alive, eating them alive. He thought that this couldn't have been the case if the mind underlying nature was a rational one. He thought that mind was an instinctive one, a tentative one, going about its business in a passionate, unthought through way and therefore blind. But when he used the word blind, he didn't mean that it was unconscious. This is a classical misinterpretation of Schopenhauer. What he meant by blind will is that it's instinctive, passion driven will, as opposed to metacognitive, deliberate will. So he basically divides this world, which he sees from his idealistic position, as you do, completely mental, but he divides it into will and representation. Yeah, but these are not two distinct ontological categories. Schopenhauer is very clear in many, many, many passages. He says there is only will. The will is all there is. The representation is what the will looks like from a certain point of view. In other words, the representation is not commensurate with the will. It's not something else that is as fundamental as the will. It's just the appearance of the will. It's quite explicit about it. So for him, there is only the will, but we can perceive the will from a certain perspective, a certain point of view, in the form that we call representation, by which he meant perception, the categories of perception. I mean, the images and sounds, all of the qualia that we perceive in our minds would be equivalent to representation. Yeah, everything you pick up with your eyes, with your nose, with your tongue, your ears, your skin, perceptual qualia, these are representation. And you can have direct access to the will without the representation, through introspection, when you experience your own endogenous volition, so the things you desire, the things you fear. You can experience fear and desire, even if you are with closed eyes in a perfect sensory deprivation chamber. You don't need perceptual qualia to experience your endogenous passions like desire and fear. And for him, desire and fear are samples, give us insight into what the will is. He thinks that from the inside, we are will, in the sense of our desires and fears. But he thinks that nature at large, too, from the inside perspective, from the first person perspective, is also will, and that will presents itself to us on the screen of perception as representation. So feelings, fear and desire, lust and fear, and other emotions that we experience directly but are not perceptual qualities, he would associate that with our ability to directly access the very essence of the universe. That's correct. There is some discussion about that, because he also said the will is outside space and time. And one could argue that your fears and your desires are at least within time, not within space. They transcend space, but you feel them in time. So there is a tricky point there that Schopenhauer himself didn't resolve very explicitly. I think it's implicitly resolved. They discussed this at length in the book. But each of these little, how to say, bridges on his wall open up space for modern philosophers to jump in and create tremendous confusion. Schopenhauer's ideas were very clear. He had tremendous clarity of thought. So I would agree with you. For him, feelings are not representation at all. Actually, he says that explicitly. Feelings are not representation. And therefore, they can only be one thing. They can only be will. All of this was written pretty much before the entire field of experimental science got off the ground. There's been an enormous amount of research now on emotions and how they are generated in the limbic system and so on that Schopenhauer didn't have access to. Do you think his philosophy is still commensurate with contemporary science in this regard? Absolutely. I think he anticipated things that, had we heeded in time, before the quantum mechanics revolution of the early 20th century, there wouldn't be quantum mechanics dilemmas today. They wouldn't have arisen because Schopenhauer would have preemptively solved them through the category of will. By postulating the will, we escape, we circumvent all the difficult dilemmas of quantum mechanics. And Schopenhauer is sometimes accused to be a crass materialist, even by supposed experts. And this is just an absurd accusation. And the accusation is based on the fact that he talks about brain function as something inherent to us human beings, that we are sort of driven in a way by brain function. But when he says that, what he means is the brain is the representation on this screen of perception of the inner will. All that really exists is the will. But the will presents itself to us, the will of a human being presents itself to another human being as the organ we call the brain. And therefore, when he talks about the brain sort of driving our behavior, what he's saying is that it's the will that's driving our behavior, but that will presents itself as a brain. So he talks about the brain. He's certainly most definitely not a materialist. I guess what you're saying is even though he was acknowledged as one of the great philosophers of the 19th century, he's been widely misunderstood. A lot of the positive things people have to say about him are not related to his metaphysics. They are related to his ethics. They are related even to his writing style, which is so compelling, so clear. Those long phrases, but at the same time, they are clear. Long phrases like you can do only in German, right? You can't do those in English, but very clear. On the metaphysics side, however, I mean, his aesthetics is celebrated. What he has to say about art, about love, all of this is celebrated. When it comes to how he saw the world, what is the essence of the world, he is accused of having been incoherent and self-contradictory. Both of these accusations, I believe very strongly, and that's a case I make in the book, are based on tremendous misunderstandings of what he had to say. His clarity of discourse is such that I find it unbelievable that so-called experts could have misinterpreted him at such a basic level. He emphasizes the distinction, or you certainly emphasize it in interpreting him, between pure experience versus what you call metacognition. Yes, yes. That's very important, because Schopenhauer is very clear when he says that we shouldn't interpret him as stating that there is deliberate volition underlying the inanimate universe, underlying nature at large. He emphasizes that, and sometimes he uses the word consciousness, Bewusstsein, in the sense of metacognitive experience or metaconsciousness. And sometimes he uses the exact same word, Bewusstsein, in the sense of raw experience, not requiring metacognition. There are several passages in which you can discern exactly what he's doing, but in general, this distinction is critical for understanding Schopenhauer. If you don't make this distinction, you cannot grasp him, because for him, only we humans have developed the power of metacognitive deliberation. Not only are we phenomenally conscious, we can access the contents of our experience as objects. We can think about our thoughts. We can evaluate our emotions. And he thinks that this is only us, only we can do that. In nature, there are emotions. There are even thoughts, but they are not metacognitive. They are not re-represented. In Schopenhauer's terminology, they are not re-presented. They are not re-presentation. That's an interesting word that you use, re-represented. And you suggest it can be almost an infinite spiral of a sort. We can keep re-representing our re-representations. Yeah, yeah. I know I feel good right now, and I know that I know that I feel good. By the way, I know that I know that I know that I feel good. You know, this can go on forever. As you introspect, you can access your field of experience in this self-reflective manner. And Schopenhauer does insist that in nature at large, this was not the case. Nature was blind. His code word for nature is not metacognitive. It is not re-representing its experiential states. But some people misinterpret that, and they think that he's saying nature is not experiential. Therefore, the will is not consciousness. And therefore, he's not an idealist. And from then on, it's just an amazing flood of confusion. Now, one of the metaphors that Schopenhauer used that you mentioned, comparing the will to the intellect, is that the will is like a giant, very strong but blind, and carrying on his shoulders the intellect, who is lame, can't see, I'm sorry, is lame, can't walk, and therefore is very weak. Yeah, and it's like, you know, the intellect is like a little lighthouse on top of a mountain of instinctive passion. The intellect has very little power. And we know that from direct experience. I mean, can you think yourself out of depression? Can you think yourself out of worry? You can't. You're completely in the hands of your emotions, of your unconscious, yeah, the word unconscious, I use it with a lot of reservation, subconscious mental life. Our intellect, yeah, it can conceptualize things, but it has little power to change how we feel. This is basically what Schopenhauer was saying. We too are the blind will. We are a mountain of blind will, extraordinarily powerful, we are driven by it. But we can shine a light on that, because we can re-represent, or what Schopenhauer called abstractly represent, abstract representation for him is what we today would call a re-representation. We can shine a light on that and at least become metacognitively aware that this is how we feel. We can't change how we feel by thinking our way out of it. But we know that this is how we feel. And for him, this is already a step forward, but a very dangerous step because it's also the source of all suffering. People regard Schopenhauer as a pessimist because of his emphasis on suffering. And I've also heard him compared to being a Buddhist. Yeah, but you know, one of the noble truths is that life is suffering, right, maybe even the first one. So there isn't a contradiction there. But at the same time, we don't emphasize that aspect of Buddhism, that realization that suffering is inherent to our existence as living creatures. We don't say that Buddhism is a pessimist religion, because although they acknowledge that, the way they go about it is, how to say, this is just a part of life. It's not something to be negative about. It's just something to recognize and be open to it. And next to all that suffering that is intrinsic to life, there is also loving kindness. To acknowledge suffering doesn't deny loving kindness in Buddhism. But in Buddhism, we understand this. We don't say, oh, it's a pessimist religion. But for Schopenhauer, for some reason, all we see is his pessimism. We don't see that there is tremendous positivity in other aspects of what he says. His understanding of music is extraordinarily positive. This inherent rhythms of beauty, which he associates with the platonic forms. He thinks that all nature is, in fact, driven by platonic forms, which are archetypes of beauty as well. Wasn't it Plato who said, truth and beauty are one on one. They go hand in hand. So there is more to Schopenhauer than just raw pessimism. Well, you mentioned earlier the idea that the intellect cannot pull us out of depression. For example, there are many people who would argue against that, cognitive behavioral therapists, but also William James, who was born, I think, 18 years before Schopenhauer died. So there was some overlap. William James believed that he cured himself of depression using positive thinking, the mind cure. He proclaimed, I think, that is one of the great discoveries of his era, that we can control our lives by controlling our thoughts. I'm under the impression that Hegel also emphasized the importance of the intellect over instinct. So there are some differences between Schopenhauer's philosophy and other, let's say, branches of philosophy. Surely. There's no denying that. I think statistically, it is difficult to say that we can really solve our depression, our ennui, our existential despair by thinking positively. Otherwise, we wouldn't have the epidemic of depression and existential despair that we see spreading around the world like bushfire in recent years. I will not deny that in some cases it may be possible, although I feel very skeptical about it. And the reason is, I am with Jung and the depth psychologists on this. I think the superficial positive changes that you can achieve by altering your patterns of thinking, like in cognitive behavioral therapy, they are just that. They are quite superficial. And once the monster lying in the depths rears its head, you can think positively as much as you want. You're going to be swallowed up because our foundations are not driven by thought. Our foundations are driven by the blind will. I think Schopenhauer would think along these same lines because his recipe for dealing with suffering is not positive thinking at all. His recipe was to overwhelm thinking. His recipe was to get rid of thinking, get rid of abstract representation by flooding your consciousness with pure, unrepresented perception such that you could access the primary templates behind the forms of the world. And if you could penetrate through the screen of perception and grasp those platonic forms underlying everything, your consciousness would be so overwhelmed by that that the suffering induced by metacognitive reasoning would disappear and you would be free. And Schopenhauer's freedom, therefore, is a freedom from reasoning, from deliberate thinking, and freedom from personal identity as well, because he says that personal identity is generated by metacognitive thinking, by abstract representations. And once we pierce through that screen, we will realize that we are one with the world and then all suffering ceases. That seems to be very much akin with what's often been described as the perennial philosophy of mystics in every age and culture. Sure. And I think today it would be mostly recognized as an instance of non-dual philosophy, of Advaita Vedanta in the East, which Schopenhauer was aware of. I mean, he didn't derive his ideas from that. It was a case of convergence. He had already written, I think, the world as we were in representation once he got in touch with an Eastern scholar who introduced him to Vedanta. But today he would be recognized as a master of Vedanta. And in the West, we don't see him like that. We look for our masters in the East and we miss out on the fact that there is somebody with the same background we have, you know, a Dutch-German who independently of the East, although he converged towards the East, had those insights as well. Only a hundred, well, 210 years ago, because that's when he started thinking about the world as we were in representation in the second decade of the 19th century. So much closer than those Eastern masters we talk so often about today, closer to us both in time and in culture. So when he refers to the will as being the essence of everything, he also regards it as being singular, not that there are many wills in a pluralistic fashion, but that we are all partaking of this very same will in our essence. Yes. For him, and he follows Kant on this, for him, the scaffolding of space-time is a mode of perception. It's something that exists in our mind, in the way we perceive the world. It is a mental category. It is not a objective space-time scaffolding out there. For him, there is no space-time out there. It's just something that we came up with in order to facilitate our understanding of what's going on. We need to take things apart and spread them in time and space and look at their connections, causal connections, in order to be able to tell ourselves a story about what's going on. But this is an artifact of our intellect for Schopenhauer. Out there, there is only unity, because if there is no objective time and space, then there is no context for one thing to be different from another. For there to be differences, things need to be separated from each other, either in time or in space. But if two things occupy the same volume of space at the same time, then they are not two things, they are only one. So for Schopenhauer, there is only one will, as he says, the one eye of the world that looks out from every living creature. And separation is what we create. He called it the principium individuationis. Perception for him is the principle of individuation, the principle of making things separate, of taking things apart. But for him, this is just our own cognitive category. It doesn't have real existence. One of the areas that puzzles me is this, that on the one hand, this will is described as being blind and instinctive. And on the other hand, as I recall, you emphasize that there seems to be a purpose, a telos, a drive towards greater metacognition. I don't think these two things are contradictory, although they may sound like that. But think of it this way, even if you are a purely instinctive animal, you know if things are going in a way that you like or if things are going in a way that you don't like, you will avoid cold. You prefer to be warm. You don't like to be hungry. You go for food. If you're thirsty, you go for water. So you don't need to be metacognitive to orient your behavior in a way that satisfies an inner desire, an inner longing. It can be physiological, like I need water, otherwise I'll die thirsty, which animals don't tell themselves. I mean, they just feel the thirst and they go after water. Or it can be something a lot more sophisticated, something a lot more subtle, an inner longing for self-understanding. But even this subtle kind of inner longing does not require metacognition to be a fact. I can have a longing for self-understanding without being able to tell myself that, hey, I am having a longing for self-understanding. You don't tell yourself that story, but you are drawn in that direction. So I think for Schopenhauer, nature is drawn in a certain direction. Nature has an intrinsic, instinctive, but felt inner longing for self-recognition, self-understanding. And nature is desperate. It's going about and bumping on things. It doesn't really know what it's doing, but it knows if what it's doing is making things better or worse. And therefore, there is a preferential direction. There is a telos, there is an effort, an instinctive effort, at getting a grip on itself, at figuring out what is going on here. Why am I feeling what I'm feeling? This, for him, is the telos of an instinctive, blind will in nature. When he refers to nature in this sense, and you point out that he often writes colloquially the way we would speak in conversation, he does distinguish between the human, the animal, the plant and the mineral kingdoms. He does. And then the distinction he makes is based on the degree of metacognition or in the degree to which abstract representation, which is his words, have developed. So for him, the mineral kingdom is the appearance or the representation of purely instinctive, volitional processes. So if you were the mineral world, you would only feel passions, no ability to metacognize. You would only feel raw passions. That's what the mineral world is in and of itself from a first person perspective. And that presents itself to us in the form of rocks and water and whatnot, soil. And then the degree of metacognition grows. He thinks that although a plant doesn't metacognize, it reacts. A sunflower can turn to follow the sun. So there is something in the inner life of a plant that tells the plant, hey, it's better when I'm pointing to the sun. Things feel better. Things feel warmer. Whatever, whatever that is. So there is reaction. An animal already has a degree of metacognition. For him, perception or representation entails a small degree of metacognition because that's required for you to differentiate the subject from the object. My cat knows that it is different from the food it eats. That's why it goes after the food, because my cat makes that distinction. It recognizes, not metacognitively to the extent that we can, but there is some small degree of metacognition that allows an animal to separate subject from object, to think of itself as an entity separate from the things in the world out there. And then it goes all the way to a human being which can abstractly re-represent abstract representations of abstract representations and so on and so forth. And for him, this ability to re-represent is the outcome of an instinctive desire in nature for self-recognition and self-understanding. That's why nature favors life so much, because it bumped on something by accident, whatever, it bumped on something that made a first spark of self-reflection and self-awareness pop out of a sea of purely instinctual passion. And now that it bumped on that, it keeps pushing on in that direction, as you would expect an instinctive passion to do. You've used the word passion in reference to rocks and streams of water and the like, but I'm sure you don't mean that they actually feel emotion the way we would think of passion. As I recall, you referred to them as being expressions of what we call the laws of nature. Yes, there is a critical distinction here. Schopenhauer was not a panpsychist. Schopenhauer denied the existence of multiple subjects. For him, there was only one subject, only the one eye of the world that looked out from every living creature. So he was not a panpsychist. Therefore, for him, a rock was not conscious in and of itself. A stream was not conscious in and of itself. The moon was not conscious in and of itself. That's not what Schopenhauer was saying. What he was saying is that the rock, the stream, the moon are all segments that we sort of pick out from a broad image that we could call the inanimate universe. And the inanimate universe as a whole was the will. So there is something it is like to be the inanimate universe as a whole. And what that is, is a instinctive passion. So you can't talk about the whole non-biological universe being passion, instinctive passion. That's OK. That's consistent with Schopenhauer. As a matter of fact, he said just as much. Where it goes wrong is when you say the rock has passion, the stream has passion. That's as absurd as to say that one synaptic cleft inside your brain has a thought. No, it is part of your brain. Your brain has a thought. I'm not even sure I would agree that the brain itself has a thought. I'd say the mind has a thought. But the brain is the image of a thought. Yeah. OK, I like that. You said earlier that Schopenhauer, his philosophy would have, had we recognized it earlier, helped us to avoid some of the paradoxes that we now face in philosophy of mind and in quantum physics. And I know we're going to do a whole separate interview on quantum physics, but let's just go over it briefly in terms of what these paradoxes are and how Schopenhauer's philosophy resolves them. If I can summarize in a not very accurate way, but accurate enough, it's not unfair what I'm going to say. The key dilemmas of quantum mechanics today, it boils down to one thing. We know that there is something out there that does not depend on us. Otherwise, there wouldn't be such a consistency across the world you perceive and report, the world I perceive and report, the world my cat perceives and reports in his own way. So there is something out there that does not depend on our individual minds. I think this is an empirical fact. At the same time, quantum mechanics also shows that whatever this something is, it is not matter, because matter does not exist until it's observed. It turns into an epistemic entity, not a nontic entity. In other words, it turns into a abstract wave of probabilities, if one wants to talk about it, which is just our way to describe our knowledge of that thing. It is not that thing. That thing is not probabilities. Probabilities is how we conceptualize our knowledge, our limited knowledge of it. So that's the problem. There is something out there, but it can't be matter. Oh, darn. Matter is all there is. So there cannot be something out there. Oh, but there is something out there. And then you get into this drama, you see. Now, there comes Schopenhauer. Matter for him is representation. It's the appearance of something. So, yes, matter is only there once it's observed, because it's the appearance of something. You cannot talk about the appearance until something is observed. Otherwise it doesn't appear. It just is what it is from a first person perspective. But in addition to representation, in addition to appearance, in addition to matter, there is the will. And that would reconcile, would solve the dilemmas of physics. The moment you acknowledge that physics is a science of representation and not of the will. In other words, physics is the science of what is perceived, not of what is felt endogenously. The moment you make that distinction and you accept that there is something else behind what physics can study, the problems are solved. When nobody's looking at the world, the world is real. When we look at it, the will presents itself as representation. One of the other paradoxes involving panpsychism, which is an increasingly popular metaphysical position relating to the mind-body problem. I think it's called the combination problem that if every particle is conscious, how does that combine to form a conscious organism? Yeah, Schopenhauer, this wasn't even a problem for him because he would never acknowledge that a particle is conscious. He wouldn't even acknowledge that there are separate particles. Because remember, for him, the principium individuationis is the screen of perception. Only in perceiving do we separate things. But things as they are in themselves, independent of how they are perceived, are one. There is only one universal will for Schopenhauer, the one eye over the world. So for him, there aren't such things as separate subatomic particles. By the way, for physics, quantum field theory, there aren't such things as separate subatomic particles either. Particles are just patterns of oscillation in a quantum field. They aren't separate things, which is something the panpsychist forgets or doesn't know of. It renders panpsychism incoherent right there on the outset. But anyway, so for Schopenhauer, there aren't separate particles. So there is no panpsychism. The problem Schopenhauer faced and pretended he didn't face, and that's the main criticism one can make of his philosophy, is he didn't solve the decombination problem, the decomposition problem. Because if there is only one will, how is it that I cannot read your thoughts? How is it that I cannot see the world from your eyes? Because I can't. And so we don't seem to be the same subject. And Schopenhauer would say, well, that is the case only because, you know, when you are represented on the screen of my perception, you appear to be separate. But even if I forget all that and I forget representation and perception, I still shouldn't be able to feel what you feel if we are all part of one will. That problem he didn't quite solve explicitly. He flirted with it. He circumambulated it, to use a handy Jungian term. He went around it. He threw several hints. There is a chapter in the world as will and representation, which is entirely about cognitive association. So he was flirting with the idea of dissociation to explain how one will can appear to be many. But he didn't really go all the way in that direction, explicitly pin it down. I think that's the criticism that one can leverage against him, not the combination problem. For him, it wasn't even a problem to begin with. The problem that you do raise, though, how one will can appear to be many, could be amplified when we look at not only do we appear to be separate and distinct, but we're in conflict with each other all the time. There you go. There you go. And of course, Schopenhauer recognized this conflict. For him, it was precisely the conflict between individual expressions of the will that led to suffering, because they would self-identify with something that doesn't exist. In other words, with an individual. And for him, that was the source of all suffering. As it is in Buddhism, as it is in Advaita Vedanta, I mean, it all converged. So basically what you're saying is that you and I aren't really separate individuals. Actually, in our essence, we are one. Yes. For Schopenhauer, the eye that looks out to the world behind your eyelids is the same eye that looks out into the world behind my eyelids. And I use the word eye here purposefully in an ambiguous way. It could be E-Y-E or it could be just the letter I. For him, it's only through abstract representation, through representation, that this one eye of the world that looks out from every individual creature invests itself with an illusory individual identity. In other words, for him, if you and I were to be placed in a sensory deprivation chamber, an ideal, perfect sensory deprivation chamber, so we would have no perceptual input. And if you and I could, for at least a moment, be completely amnesic and forget everything, so you have no memories and you have no perceptions, but you still have inner life, your inner life would be exactly like my inner life. It would be that one eye of the world. That would be Schopenhauer's position, I think. Well, to me, that is sort of the bedrock, you could even call it kindergarten understanding. It's like the fundamental principle, the basis of, I have to say, the basis of my philosophy, the basis of everything I've attempted to do over the last half century in interviews like that, like this one. But it seems to be so fundamental. It's also, for most people, the most difficult idea to grasp. Now, picture this. In 1818, there was a Western man, educated, able to publish, friends with Goethe, contemporary of Hegel, disciple of Kant. You couldn't get more Western than that. Who had already addressed this? Who was already saying what today we are trying to convince ourselves of or to really grasp? Because it's one thing to know this conceptually. It's another thing to live like it. And I think it's even fair to ask whether Schopenhauer really lived like it or not. I think most of the time he did, but sometimes not. He had his embitterments as well. I think this is sobering to know that over 200 years ago in the West, this idea was crystallized. It congealed and was published in a very accessible book. I mean, this should be a shock to all of us, should shake us and wake us up to our own inheritance, to our own culture, to what we received from previous generations and sort of overlook. I gather that in his personal life, he had many quarrels with individuals. He had lots of quarrels with women. There is no disguising the fact that he was a, what's the English word when you put women down? Sexist. And then now there's another. Misogynist. A misogynist. There is no doubt he was a misogynist. Look, he was a man of his time. And this is not an excuse, but it helps us understand. You can understand without forgiving. And I understand him. He had loads of conflict. He never married. He died alone, living in a guest house. His company were poodle dogs. He had a series of poodles. He called all of them Atman, the self in Eastern traditions. And when a poodle would die, he would get another one and he would call that new poodle the same name. And the reason was for him, there were no poodles. There was only the platonic idea of the poodle. So every poodle dog, every individual was an expression of that same idea. So every dog was the same thing expressing itself in different ways. So here you have a bachelor of 71 years of age living in a guest house with poodles for company. This is not the life of somebody who is socially integrated. So he had his quarrels with the world. He was he was very bitter, for instance, in his early days. He had a great image of himself when he was young. He thought he was a super duper guy. And he was invited to give lectures at the university. And he on purpose scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel's because he wanted to draw all those people going to Hegel's nonsensical lectures to his lecture. And guess what? Almost nobody showed up. And he was embittered for years. He could not understand how a farce, which is what he thought of Hegel, could attract all the attention. And he himself not. The first edition of his book, the bulk of it was burned or pulped. I don't know. It didn't sell at all. He only achieved a degree of recognition in the last 10 years of his life. And then I gather after his death, his fame grew even more. Yes, but mainly because of other aspects of his work than metaphysics. For some reason, his metaphysics is not only misunderstood, but misrepresented liberally. People say absurdities about it. University professors who are recognized as Schopenhauer scholars, specialists. And the absurdities they say about Schopenhauer is it's just flabbergasting. But he became known as the philosopher of pessimism. I mean, our dear Nietzsche started out as a disciple of Schopenhauer and then he turned on Schopenhauer later in his life. He thought Schopenhauer was full of it. But in the early days, Nietzsche was a disciple of Schopenhauer. And I think he resonated because he provided a contrast to the mainly Christian philosophy of the time, which you would have it that the world is the creation of a perfectly good, well-intentioned God. And it's difficult to reconcile this philosophy with the reality that we live in, in which suffering, cruelty is just abundant. It's overwhelming. So when somebody like Schopenhauer comes and says, look, you know what? The wheel is blind instead of God is good. It sort of gives people an alternative. And I think on the basis of that, he was pursued by the likes of Nietzsche and others. He had a lot to say about aesthetics as well, about the arts. He was very influential in the arts. I mean, if you're a musician and here is a philosopher saying that music is the most perfect representation of nature, of what nature is in and of itself. Hey, hey, you know, I am a musician, so I'm above the rest. So I think that that's why his ideas on those other fields permeated the culture. But his metaphysics didn't. And I think that's a tragedy. Had it not happened this way, the West would be a very different place today. Because one of your missions in life seems to be to resurrect and improve upon, I would say, Schopenhauer's metaphysics. Well, being more explicit where he wasn't that much explicit, improve upon is a big thing. You know, you're talking about one of the monsters of Western philosophy here. But maybe, you know, make it more explicit, address more directly certain things that he only touched briefly on. And update, because there's been so much development both in philosophy, but in the sciences since then. Yes, we can give Schopenhauer a new language. He had the language of his time. In the language of his time, there was no distinction between phenomenal consciousness and metaconsciousness. They only had one word, the first sign. So this is what he used. And that's how he was translated. So we can give him updated language, which should make him a lot more accessible. Another thing that would make him more accessible is that he was very verbose. The world as we own representation has over 1,200 pages written in tiny, tiny type eight or nine letters with very, very narrow spacing between the lines. So it is a monster of a read. You know, you got to be ready to really take a plunge on that one. And he repeats himself over and over and over again with different words, trying to be clear. That's why I'm so flabbergasted that he was so misunderstood, because you can fault him for being verbose, but not for being unclear. And I think in this day and age, nobody will have the time, the presence of mind, even the will to play with words here, to plunge into those 1,200 pages. So we can eliminate the repetitions. We can summarize it and sort of give the basics of Schopenhauer, the metaphysical part. And your new book on decoding Schopenhauer is that. It's very succinct. I think the text ran about 120 pages only. But I found it, frankly, very clear and easy to read. So you've done an excellent job in translating Schopenhauer for modern readers. I encourage our viewers to take a look at your book. And Bernardo, I'm looking forward to our next conversation in which we're going to dig into many of the details of quantum physics and show why it is that Schopenhauer's philosophy of 200 years ago is consistent with quantum physics today. Fantastic. I'm looking forward to that. So thank you so much for being with me. Thanks for having me, Jeff. And for those of you watching, thank you for being with us.