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

Hello everyone. I'm Steven West. This is philosophize this. patreon.com/fosifthis 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 Frederick Nichze and Arthur Schopenhower. 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 Nze thought the Stoics weren't lifeaffirming enough in their view of the world and so robbed themselves of some of the most critical aspects of life. And Arthur Schopenhower thought that the Stoics were too lifeaffirming 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.

Going to start with some niche 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 NZ had with the entire history of Western philosophy. See, by the time Nich is 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.

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 overintellectualize 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 decadants than this....