00:10Arthur Schopenhauer died 150 years ago.
00:14Alongside Nietzsche and Marx, he was perhaps the most influential philosopher of his century.
00:18Most people only know the grim pessimist because of his contemptuous remarks about women.
00:22I'm going to hold back now.
00:25Schopenhauer was far ahead of his time.
00:27He was the first to doubt the Enlightenment's idolization of reason.
00:32He recognized the drives of man and thus paved the way for psychoanalysis.
00:38Schopenhauer was also the first to integrate Far Eastern wisdom into his thinking.
00:42And Reinhold Jaretzky now points out another aspect.
00:46Schopenhauer as the ancestor of green sentiment.
00:49That concludes my remarks for today.
00:51Next Friday, Aspekte will be coming entirely from Argentina.
00:55Bonnes notches.
00:58What does this pig have to do with German philosophy?
01:01And this poodle?
01:03With such questions, Arthur Schopenhauer hurled a spark into Western thought.
01:09For him, the animal is equal to the human.
01:13Schopenhauer, the poodle lover, depicted here by his admirer Wilhelm Busch.
01:18considers the glorification of man as an elite being to be a ridiculous, self-absorbed error.
01:28Throughout the history of European philosophy, man has been distinguished from other beings by the fact that he is a rational being.
01:35And for Schopenhauer, he is essentially a creature driven by instincts.
01:41And reason, as he says, is only an epiphenomenon, that is, an add-on, but which is basically
01:49taken does not play a major role.
01:51Animal rights activists should fall to their knees before these philosophical radicals.
01:55Zimmer's brilliant Schopenhauer biography shows the philosopher as a highly topical thinker.
02:01The average person has absolutely no right to inflict suffering on an animal.
02:05He should behave as if he were unprivileged, modest, and on equal terms.
02:11Schopenhauer vehemently opposed the view of nature and animals merely as useful things to be exploited.
02:21or exploits.
02:22For him, the animal was also a being that had its own rights.
02:26In that sense, he is the forerunner of modern animal ethics and also environmental ethics.
02:35Passions, drives, even destructive life forces, Schopenhauer calls all of this will; they drive man through his existence.
02:42Almost 200 years ago, Schopenhauer expressed a truth that later became self-evident from Freud to modernity.
02:52He is the cold diagnostician who shatters the illusion of good people and a well-ordered world.
02:59For him, man is a puppet of the will, an evil puppet with the talent for greed, suffering and destruction.
03:08For Schopenhauer, man is the only being capable of cruelty, that is, of consciously harming other beings.
03:18that he uses the little bit of reason he has left, so to speak, in such a way that he
03:26causes harm to others.
03:28Schopenhauer's messages are unpleasant. It was almost by chance that he stated we descended from apes, anticipating Darwin.
03:35Quite by chance, we could also be walking around as intelligent poodles.
03:40For Schopenhauer, it is a world in which a disordered, aimless energy prevails, which has no other goal than to...
03:49to testify to it themselves.
03:51There is no plan behind it, and no reason either.
03:54He contrasts the ideas of a loving God and morally acting humans with the bleakness of a chaotic and selfish world.
04:02He accuses the Enlightenment of being an illusion and calls our lives a dreary oscillation between pain and boredom.
04:10Happiness is nothing but a swindle.
04:14He says that all happiness is initially deceptive, because our existence is fundamentally suffering.
04:21And everything we experience in terms of pleasure and joy ultimately leads to new suffering.
04:27That means all happiness is only peripheral, only temporary, only very, very fleeting.
04:36Schopenhauer's major theme is boredom, this plague, because there is simply no meaning in human life.
04:43Boredom must therefore be banished.
04:46Before the entertainment industry existed, the philosopher had already philosophically proven the addiction to it.
05:02Boredom is a pleasure.
05:30Boredom is a pleasure.
06:09Subtitling by ZDF for funk, 2017