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

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com/philosophize this. Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there. 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, Frederick Nietzsche thought the stoics weren't life affirming enough in their view of the world, and so rob 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 eighteen hundreds, he thought there'd been over two thousand 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. Decadence was a sign of a physiological and cultural decline that's gone on in people over time. The world's become a place apparently where there are more and more people who over intellectualize about everything. More people who have weakened drives, a weak sense of vitality, far more weakness of the will going on, more people that spend their time morally judging other people rather than doing the things themselves. There's many more examples of decadence than this, but this all originated Nietzsche thought. And people like Socrates and Plato, who started this trend of people being practically obsessed with the idea that there must be some kind of rational, stable order to the way that things play out in the universe. Now how could those two things be connected? But look, don't get them wrong. Nietzsche is by all means a fan of rationality as a tool we can use to shape our thinking. He thinks obviously we need it. But he thinks that if you treated reason as though it's the tool …