Arthur Schopenhauer was a German Philosopher born in 1788 known for his dark pessimistic philosophical reflections.

For Schopenhauer, the underlying force of reality is the Will (also called will to live or will to life), which is the essence of existence. It is an unconscious and blind desire that restlessly strives for more activity. The will is the tornado that swirls inside of us and throws us from one place to the other, it is the source of our insatiable appetite that results in strife and misery.  

Schopenhauer’s writing is far from the sterile and academic German of the time, his work is straight-forward, colloquial, concrete, full of metaphors and anecdotes. His philosophy sent him on a quest for tranquility and peace of mind. He offers as alternatives the denial of the will, the wisdom of life through philosophy, aesthetics and ethics.

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━━━━━━━━━━━━━⌛ Timestamps(0:00) Introduction: Arthur Schopenhauer(7:47) The World as Will and Representation(15:07) The Will to Reproduce(16:36) The World as Evil(22:52) The Denial of the Will(25:11) Philosophy: The Wisdom of Life(27:32) Aesthetics(30:45) Ethics

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Nothingness is generally considered to be analogous with death and extinction which every healthy living instinct wants to avoid. Many find the notion of nothingness unfathomable.   

Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani, however, was convinced that the way out of nihilism, that which renders meaningless the meaning of life, could only be reached by gazing into the abyss itself.   

Nishitani understands human existence as consisting in three fields: consciousness, nihility and emptiness. Nihility is as part of the fabric of reality as Being is, it is relative nothingness, and emptiness is absolute nothingness, where the “absolute negation” as the negation of negation becomes the “great affirmation”.   

In the openness of śūnyatā realised by nihility overcoming itself, one completely oversteps the confines of self-consciousness and comes to be free of egocentrism, anthropocentrism and even theocentrism, thus allowing ultimate reality to manifest itself in all its fullness.  

We will be focusing on two important works of Nishitani: The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism and Religion and Nothingness.

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⌛ Timestamps

(0:00) Introduction: Keiji Nishitani

(4:24) The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism

(8:12) Religion and Nothingness

(14:36) Consciousness, Nihility, Emptiness

(19:13) Cosmic Individual

While lecturing on anxiety, Christian existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich noticed that there was an enormous response in the post-war era, especially in the younger people, and he sought to give an answer to the growing anxiety which had developed. The aftereffects of the two World Wars had left the world in a state of disorientation, estrangement, anxiety and meaninglessness.

Tillich tells us that there are three types of anxiety: anxiety of death which is tied to the unpredictability of fate (ontic anxiety) anxiety of guilt and condemnation which is linked to the failure to live up to our ideal (moral anxiety), and anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, when what one had found most meaningful in life is transformed into indifference or aversion (spiritual anxiety).

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⌛ Timestamps

(0:00) Introduction: Paul Tillich

(3:17) Method of Correlation

(4:02) The Courage to Be: Introduction

(5:49) The Courage to Be: Anxiety

(11:30) The Courage to Be: Participation and Individualisation

(13:12) The Ground of Being

(14:20) Symbols

(16:17) The Ultimate Concern

Lovecraft's dark philosophy is known as Cosmicism, which focuses on the insignificance of humanity and its doings at the cosmos-at-large, in contrast to the anthropocentric philosophies in which many find intellectual reassurance.  This form of non-anthropocentrism is crucial to the philosophy of Cosmicism.  

The question of the meaning of life was better left unanswered. Cosmicism is a type of extreme existentialism, as it brings up the uncertainty about the role of humanity in the uncaring universe, an existential crisis on a large scale.   

Lovecraft embraces the truth of reality. Things are important to us on the human scale, but we simply don’t matter in the cosmos. He described us as "the miserable denizens of a wretched little flyspeck on the back door of a microscopic universe.”

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━━━━━━━━━━━━━⌛ Timestamps(0:00) Introduction: Fear of the Unknown(1:35) A Biography of H.P. Lovecraft(7:20) Introdction: Cosmicism(12:00) The Cthulhu Mythos: Introduction(14:03) The Cthulhu Mythos: The Elder Things(15:10) The Cthulhu Mythos: The Great Old Ones and The Deep Ones(18:05) The Cthulhu Mythos: The Outer Gods(21:26) Fourth Dimensional Horrors(24:48) Forbidden Knowledge (25:50) The Dreamlands(26:37) Otherness: Anti-Human Becoming

Few artists have so powerfully evoked the uncanny otherness of the unconscious like Swiss artist Peter Birkhäuser. His unknown dream paintings were met with blank incomprehension, and were not well-received by the art community of the time, but, viewed today, his vivid paintings bear striking testament to the disruptive and transformative reality of individuation, the purpose of Jungian psychology, which is to seek wholeness of personality by bringing the unconscious contents into reality.  

After a midlife crisis, Birkhäuser dedicated himself exclusively to bringing these unconscious images into reality. Just how hard this struggle with himself must have been is suggested by the fact that it took the artist twelve years to make the great break and paint a picture entirely according to his own imagination, with no model from the real world.   

The fantasy pictures reflect not only the artist’s own personal psychological situation, but also the spirit of the age, revealing what is taking place in the depths of the collective unconscious in all of the people of our time. Because of this, they are not easy to decipher: they are simply there, and wish to be experienced.

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⌛ Timestamps(0:00) Introduction: Peter Birkhäuser(6:06) 1. The World’s Wound (1953)(7:10) 2. The Cat (1949-1955)(8:05) 3. Depression (1954-1955)(8:39) 4. Depression #2 (Date unknown)(9:16) 5. Duel (Date unknown)(9:51) 6. Coming Up (1954-1955)(10:24) 7. The Inward Gaze (1954-1955)(11:18) 8. The Fourth Dimension (1956-1957)(12:30) 9. Imprisoned Power (1958)(13:31) 10. Fire Gives Birth (1959-1960)(13:59) 11. The Outcast (1960)(14:36) 12. Puer (1960)(15:36) 13. The Magic Fish (1961)(16:14) 14. A Birth (1961)(16:51) 15. Alarm (Date unknown)(17:07) 16. The Hidden Power (1964)(17:40) 17. Moira (1965)(18:25) 18. Untitled “The Four-Eyed Anima” (Date Unknown)(18:55) 19. At The Door (1965)(19:41) 20. With Child (1966)(19:58) 21. Anima with Crown of Light (1966)(20:28) 22. The Observer (1966)(20:54) 23. Bear at the Tree of Light (1968)(21:28) 24. Dark Brother (Date unknown)(21:51) 25. Spiritus Animalis II (1968)(22:18) 26. Window on Eternity (1970)(23:04) 27. Sun of the Night (1970)(24:04) 28. The Woman with the Cup (1971)(24:48) 29. 24 of March 1971 (1971)(25:17) 30. Constellation (1971)(25:30) 31. Lighting the Torch (1974)(25:53) 32. Having Speech (1975)(26:15) 33. In The Night of 13 October 1942 (1975)(27:30) 34. Spiritus Naturae (1976)(27:54) 35. Lynx (1976)

The anima and animus are two contrasexual archetypes crucial for individuation and to progress towards the Self in Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, they are the archetype of life and archetype of meaning, respectively.  

The anima is the personification of all female psychological tendencies in man, while the animus is the personification of all male psychological tendencies in woman.   

They form part of the collective unconscious, as archetypes or collectively inherited patterns of behaviour, which are autonomous, making them particularly difficult to integrate into one’s personality.   

The integration of the shadow, or the realisation of the personal unconscious, marks the first stage in Jungian psychology. Without it, a recognition of anima and animus is impossible.   

Shadow integration is the ‘apprentice-piece’, while the anima or animus is the ‘master-piece’.

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━━━━━━━━━━━━━⌛ Timestamps(0:00) Introduction: Carl Jung’s Model of the Psyche(2:11) Introduction: Anima and Animus(4:49) The Anima: The Woman Within(13:05) The Animus: The Man Within(17:43) Anima and Animus: Path towards Individuation

In Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. describes the nightmare of total equality, a society in which equality is finally achieved, but at the cost of freedom and individuality. One’s utopia is another’s dystopia.  

We’ll be exploring the increasing promotion of equality to the point of it being absurd as a consequence of the “unheard cry for meaning” that plagues modern society.   

The modern age is characterised by a sense of disorientation of not knowing what to do with one’s life. Nietzsche’s foresaw nihilism as an inevitable consequence of the Death of God, where God is replaced with public opinion, the entertainment culture, and the State.   

Without objective values, we fall into relativism, making us fall prey to authoritarianism and conformism, as displayed by George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984.

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The Russian existentialist philosopher Lev Shestov is known for his “philosophy of despair” or “philosophy of tragedy”. For Shestov, the sources of philosophy were the human tragedy, the horrors and sufferings of human life and the sense of hopelessness.    

Tragedies take place in the depth of the human soul, where no eye can reach out to see. Consequently, He saw the beginning of philosophy starting not with knowledge, not with wonder, but with despair.   

Despair is what he considers a “penultimate knowledge”, that is, a preliminary step that we must acknowledge, in order to progress towards something higher, the “ultimate knowledge”.

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The persona is one of Carl Jung's most well-known concepts, representing the social mask that we put on. We all embody different masks in different settings, as it is our way to adapt to the demands of society, playing an important part in shaping our social role and in how we deal with other people. But, it also has its dangers.   

We will be discussing the dangers of concealing our true self. We may use the persona to help us conceal our vulnerabilities and other parts that we do not want to reveal about ourselves, or we may excessively identify with the persona.  

The persona prevents us from what Jung considered the most important task in our lives, the process of individuation, bringing one closer to the Self.

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In the 19th century the status of mass society became a philosophical and moral issue in a manner hitherto unseen. It came to be defined as the permanent possibility in all individuals of losing concern for their personal status and worth, and assigning themselves to something outside themselves in an abstract “other”.  

We’ll be exploring the various existential critiques and interpretations of this phenomenon peculiar to modern society from four major 19th century thinkers who have integrated the event of the masses into the very structure of their philosophies: Søren Kierkegaard ("The Crowd is Untruth" and "The Public"), Friedrich Nietzsche ("The Last Man"), Martin Heidegger ("Das Man") and José Ortega y Gasset (The Mass Man").

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