Episode #237 ... The Stoics Are Wrong - Nietzsche, Schopenhauer

Stephen West· Host0:00

Hello everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!, patreon.com/philosophizethis. Philosophical writing on Substack @philosophizethisonthere. I hope you love the show today. So this podcast is kind of a part two of last episode we did talking about Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Today we're talking about the rebuttal to all that by Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. Just to be clear, the two of them never collabed on any of this stuff. This is taken from each of their work individually, and it's woven together here today because they represent such different arguments about why they thought the Stoics were wrong. Which, to put it in a single sentence that I'll spend the rest of this episode today explaining, Friedrich Nietzsche thought the Stoics weren't life-affirming enough in their view of the world, and so robbed themselves of some of the most critical aspects of life. And Arthur Schopenhauer thought that the Stoics were too life-affirming, of worldly things at least, in a way that prevents a Stoic from ever really understanding the world at a deep level. There's obviously much more to it, but this bird's eye view of the whole thing can be helpful to have at the start sometimes, I think, and we'll understand it by the end of the episode. Gonna start with some Nietzsche here today, though. And maybe the best place to start is to say that, you know, the Stoics are pretty good candidates for being the poster children of one of the biggest problems Nietzsche had with the entire history of Western philosophy. See, by the time Nietzsche's doing his work in the late 1800s, he thought there'd been over 2,000 years of decline in Western thinking, and along with it, a decline in Western civilization, I guess. He called it decadence, though it has nothing to do with decadence as we might use that word today in English.