Why Life Is Suffering | Schopenhauer and Lacan
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- čas přidán 4. 07. 2024
- "Life is Suffering". That is something that we today do not hear an awful lot, on the contrary, "You must be happy!" is what is being preached in the streets. This video will explain why life is suffering using the theory of Schopenhauer and Lacan.
The goal is not to make you feel bad or depressed - on the contrary, there is an immense freedom in knowing that you are not the only one that suffers...
----Contents of this video --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0:00 - Intro
1:06 - Part I: The Will to Live in Consciousness
6:47 - Part II: Desire as the Cause of Suffering
11:36 - Part III: The Illusion of Happiness
15:34 - Summary
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“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for someone with broad intellect and deep feeling. Truly great individuals, it seems to me, must experience great sorrow in this world.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
They don't have to be great(besides, contrasted with what?), Nor, 'evidently' intelligent. They only have to make the stupid decision to seek the truest understanding of their reality and associate it with their identity out of inability to have "faith" or "belief" in all the silly endeavors of most people. Or to take pride and stroke their ego based solely on their willingness to be honest with themselves because of the lack of any motivation or value they can find in themselves.
I'm referring to my self in the above btw. Re-read this for whatever reason and realized it came off differently than I meant it to. The point is, we all suffer, just in different ways.
@@cognitivestate9512 Some people have it worse than others, and those people are more prevalent in society.
@@con9779 yeah, even our own suffering is belittled by the fact that someone has it worse in some way. Like if I get in a car wreck and come out of it with little injury, then I'm lucky, bc I didn't die... But my car is totaled and no insurance or way to get to work. Also, thinking about just how badly so many people suffer and realizing the true nature of life is just suffering and worse suffering and death does not make me feel privileged or optimistic about my own life. None the less, I do truly try my best to see the value in and not take for granted things and people in my life, but I honestly feel drained by my inner knowledge of things and to be honest it all just makes me feel angry and hurt and frustrated with the passing of every infinitesimal moment, I feel more and more resentment and no where to aim it at, except my self. I also don't know why I'm practically using a response to a stranger as a diary. I probably sound like a babbling fool. Sorry lol
@@cognitivestate9512nonetheless, thank you for "babbling" and sharing your thoughts. I see myself in your reflection.
*gets a papercut*
"Ah, yeah. Life is suffering"
Pain and suffering is enduring a philosophy presentation with numerous spelling and grammatical errors, but with the minor consolation of Objet Petit a being consistently applied in both concept and syntax.
Damn the ending was satisfactory
If happiness is an illusion so is suffering. If we look at the dialectical relationship of happiness and suffering we have 2 abstract concepts that contradict each other but also complete each other. Take happiness for example, suffering is an inherent contradiction. We can even say it presupposes happiness and vice versa. One cannot "exist" without the other.
I agree totally that one cannot exist without the other! But suffering is inherent, it comes without effort, and happiness is only its negative. And whatever it is, it is not an illusion. Which is easy enough to demonstrate since physical pain exists. Try scratching someone's eyeball and ask if that's an illusion 😉.
What I mean when I say that happiness is an illusion, is the picture of happiness that is the standard for the world for human beings today, and that happiness is a worthwhile goal to have. That is the illusion. Hence you are correct to say that both exists, otherwise neither would exist. But happiness is only short moment in-between two moments of suffering.
Just as a difference in height lets water flow from high to low, suffering is the deficiency that motivates humans to live, it is the creator of desire.
@@eversbrothersproductions1476 (apologies for the random comment hijacking 8 months later) this sounds rather similar to the concept of Taiji and Wuji in Taoism as well as the Lotus flower in Buddhism.
The primordial, limitless lacking (Wuji) is the necessary predecessor to oneness that creates yin and yang. In other words, the suffering of our lives (mud) is the necessary predecessor for the contentment found thereafter (Lotus flower)
i struggled with these thoughts for years. at least there are writters that give comfort when putting these ideas to articulated sentences, better than i could do myself. i wonder maybe we could have more people like these if it werent for the constant distractions that the modern world imposes on us. anyways sorry if i made mistakes, english is not my language, and thank you for the video
Thank you for your comment! Regarding your comment I would say that these distractions are in place to prevent exactly these people from thinking about suffering becouse than most people would see that they are suffering. The veil of Maya that exists in our ideology today shields us from this reality. The flipside however is, as you describe, that people like you and me that know this acute suffering have sometimes difficulty finding likeminded people that wrote on this topic (like Shopenhouer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Lacan, etc.).
I am glad that you found our video! And dont worry about your english, it is fine! 😄
born and drafted to fight the war for Survival!
Hate to break it to you, but my gut tells me you will lose.
@@cognitivestate9512 no one born of a woman wins.
@@zeenohaquo7970 right. So it's more like a total slaughter than a war lol.
@@cognitivestate9512 maybe something similar to the iron maiden or Mongolian starvation torture.
Ok, here's what I think we could do. I think if we lower our amount of desires as best we can, it'll help us more. If we keep trying to chase happiness, it will just never work out so let's just stop chasing happiness, instead I think contentment is the way to go. Maybe, we need to find our own personal ways to be content with the life that we're given. This is just my opinion on it all though.
Or maybe my father had the right answer. He blew his brains out last December out of fear of suffering prison over being arrested or something related to tax fraud. He wasn't very clear about his circumstances, except that he was afraid. But hey, at least he "made his peace with God" before pulling the trigger.
@@cognitivestate9512 May your father Rest In Peace 🙏
@@chubbycookie21 thanks... Your profile pic from gto?
@@chubbycookie21 nvm that's mob psycho...
“But what does not wanting to desire mean? The whole of analytic experience - which merely gives form to what is for each individual at the very root of his experience - shows us that not to want to desire and to desire are the same thing.
To desire involves a defensive phase that makes it identical with not wanting to desire. Not wanting to desire is wanting not to desire.” - Lacan (Seminar XI)
Thank you
Magnificant. A wonderful production!
Most excellent! Thank you for this.
It should rather be "The Will to Life", since it is "Der Wille zum Leben" with a capital L in German, which means that it is a noun and not a verb, but other than that this is brilliant.
Hey, thanks for your remark! I was really in doubt as to what to use. Some translations used "life", but then I read the Cambridge one and it said "live". From now on I will use "Life" though! 😄
@@eversbrothersproductions1476 or it means sth like the process of living, the living.
This is too good
Very informative
A must watch
Living in Good faith and spending all exp on empathy. ... it doesn't solve the suffering or the absurd. But it does decrease damage received
This was wonderful, thank you. I love to see creators who cover seemingly disparate thinkers to illuminate some of the nuances in each of them. After all, this is what I think philosophy is all about: a somber, yet simultaneously bombastic acceptance of the fact that the "bewilderment of being" have been with us and will be us until our last breath.
When reading thinkers like Lacan and Schopenhauer, there is a kind of mutual comfort that comes with this bewilderment of the ages. That even these great thinkers who came before were as fickle and fool-ish as us (and I say this with love).
As someone else commented rather beautifully, maybe this acceptance of circumstances, this willingness to be bewildered, could be a path that we all walk together. A path where we cultivate bewilderment and contentment within ourselves and others
Very nice video.
Endless toil for no reward
'For if I do not want to desire, am I not desiring not to desire?...Goddamn there I go again'
That 'Goddamn' is so heart felt 😂. Love the video!
Watching this at my job.
Great video
Then you either have a really great job, or really shit. Hope it's the first! 😅
This is so empowering and beautiful! Thank you for your work you put into the videos in your channel! Amazing, helpful and uplifting! I truly appreciate it!
Thank you so much! 😄
I appreciate his work and ability to make it more easily digestible as well, but your adjectives seem a bit off, or did I totally miss something? I'd love to know that I did ...
@@cognitivestate9512 Thanks for your comment! I would be interested to know what adjectives you mean so I can take a look? 😁
That’s why there’s no greater suffering than losing a child and no greater evil than parental kidnapping, kidnapping, and parental alienation.
that thumbnail 😂 i love it loll.
i have an IQ of 8 billion lol. schopenhauer has influenced me since i was like age 14 and finally had the internet 😂 im like almost 40 now.
the more intelligent you are the deeper the suffering because you can logically deconstruct things. my friends and family all look at me like a pos to a degree cause im kinda up and down.
they can go to work and strive for things and enjoy things because they cant think far enough into the future or deep enough to realize how pointless it is lol.
me on the other hand dont need a video to explain to me the pointless suffering of life, i know well 😂 still a good video.
look at handi capable people. they cant think deep enough to even worry about tomorrow. so they are happy in the moment.
happyness in intelligent people is the rarest thing i know. is that a hemmingway quote? im still working on it.
finding purpose is hard but if i had one it would be to try to limit suffering of myself and those around me.
life is bad but it could always be worse i promise 😂 also the planet or universe took all that time to evolve us why waste it? we should stick around and do the best we can to be happy or less sad and make things better for the living things around us. people and animals.
@מוחמד אל חסן I have an IQ of about 200 so 😂 generally stupid people don't realize the superior mind they are talking to.
And what other ending? There literally is not a good ending. You die. The end.
It seems to me a bit oversimplified. The will to live - what is actually the act of "living"?! When a subject experiences depression, does he still have the will to live? Is everything really the same will?
Also regarding "suffering" - Is everything the same suffering? or are there different levels to it? do we always suffer or maybe it comes in certain waves? Is it inherently bad and negative like it seems to be portrayed (suffering vs happiness, life vs death) or maybe it's all complicated sensations though out time that we experience as part of life that we compress into simplified words to make our existence a little bit more coherent which in turn creates more suffering , negativity or sometimes positivity?
Anyone know the name of the Tischbeine mentioned at 4:30?
Nope, I have searched the entire internet, but I could not find it... I really wanted to use the original painting though😢 (Life is suffering...)
@@eversbrothersproductions1476 haha my affirmation is postponed yet again. Thank you. Your videos are seriously AMAZING
If you didn't mention it was a Schopenhauer quotes, I would've thought they were Lacan's, they share a lot of similarities in their concepts
Yes exactly! Isn't that amazing? 😄
@@eversbrothersproductions1476 what's amazing is your work here, congrats! Was Schopenhauer an inspiration for Lacan?
@@guillegamarra I have to admit that I don't know for sure. So far I have not encountered any reference of Lacan to Schopenhauer. But I can imagine that, just like Freud, Lacan has read of philosophy in order to create his own theory. So I would imagine that either he read Schopenhauer directly, or he was inferred in the works of Freud, which Lacan certainly read. 😄
@@eversbrothersproductions1476 these coincidences between thinkers who might not seem related, the arrival to similar conclusions and the expansion of previously conceived concepts is what makes me believe we are, in a way, uncovering the explanation behind the construction we call reality, because Schopenhauer through Lacan makes so much more sense in the same way (for me) that Zizek's "Hegel through Lacan Vía Marx" takes similar concepts and unifies them to create a theory that furthers our explanation of social phenomena and our understanding of it, I'd love to see a video about it, keep up the good work, greetings from Paraguay
So what is the solution to this?
A Buddhist would say that asking the question is a sign that you do not yet know that there is no problem for which you need a solution.
Schopenhauer would say that it is that which rids ourselves of sufficient reason: music, philosophy and renounciation.
Nietzsche would say that it is to live in the striving of the higher man and the love of height.
Kierkegaard would say that it is to solve our problem of despair by becoming one with our self.
Lacan says that we can never change this desiring, but that we can only learn to know ourselves a little better.
Aristotle would say that the truth is somewhere in between.
🤯🔫
Nishkam Karmayoga as told in Bhagwat gita might be the solution to live in this non sense world.
I really like this style of Yoga, but my question would be: How do we stop desiring to desire? 🤔
I think nature is evil. It pushes us to have desire and extracts suffering in return. Either you will suffer or someone else. No escape.
I think keep desires to minimum. Be busy, keep smiling.