Philosophize This! Episode #237

Title: The Stoics Are Wrong - Nietzsche, Schopenhauer
Host: Stephen West
Date: September 30, 2025

Overview

This episode of Philosophize This! continues the exploration of Stoicism, focusing on major philosophical rebuttals by Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. Stephen West guides listeners through how each thinker critiques Stoic assumptions—Nietzsche for being insufficiently life-affirming and dismissive of life's chaotic elements, and Schopenhauer for being overly committed to reducing suffering and missing the reality and instructive value of pain. The episode provides not just a critique of Stoicism but a bigger discussion on the nature of human flourishing, the role of suffering, and what it means to live well.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Nietzsche's Critique: Life-Affirmation vs. Rational Order

• Nietzsche’s View of Decline in Western Thought (01:55)

  • Nietzsche saw 2,000 years of Western “decline” due to overemphasis on rationality and stable order, beginning with Socrates and Plato.
  • “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.”
    — Stephen West paraphrasing Nietzsche (02:30)

• Being vs. Becoming (04:20)

  • The Stoics orient their philosophy toward static ideals—being in-line with reason, nature, or virtues.
  • Nietzsche insists on the universe's flux (“becoming”), believing life is about transformation and creativity, which cannot be captured in rigid rational ideals.

• Projection of Values onto Indifference (08:10)

  • Nietzsche criticizes the Stoics for projecting a rational order onto an indifferent universe.
  • They cherry-pick: order in the stars = rational universe; hurricane destroys your home = “indifferent” event to be accepted.

• Radical Amor Fati (10:40)

  • Stoic Amor Fati: love of one’s fate, because it fits a rational order.
  • Nietzsche’s Amor Fati: affirmation of all events (even chaos/disorder) regardless of rationality.
    • “He wants to love his fate whether it’s rational or not, whether it’s order, disorder, chaos.” (11:50)

• Critique of Stoic Emotional Management (14:20)

  • Nietzsche: Stoicism as “self-tyranny”—suppressing the irrational to avoid peril. Real life is messy, passionate, and learning comes as much from mistakes and suffering as from tranquility.

• Memorable Quote

  • Nietzsche on Stoicism: “Is our life really so painful and burdensome that it would be advantageous for us to trade it for a fossilized Stoic way of life?... Things are not bad enough for us that they have to be bad for us in the Stoic style.” (20:30)

• Summary of Nietzsche’s Condemnation (21:00)

  • Stoicism is too passive, unambitious—makes people tranquilized rather than alive.
  • Greatness comes from engaging with the non-ideal, suffering, and excess; Stoics play it safe, missing out on crucial opportunities for self-transformation.

2. Schopenhauer’s Critique: The Centrality and Value of Suffering

• Stoicism as Eudaimonism (After Ad Break, 30:00)

  • Schopenhauer argues Stoicism is actually about avoidance of suffering, for personal tranquility.
  • “The true goal of Stoicism for him is the inner peace of mind free from suffering. The virtues then become just things that are instrumental to be able to get there.” (31:00)

• Illusion of Suffering Removal (33:25)

  • Suffering is an intrinsic, unavoidable fact of life. Seen as a defect to be “fixed,” Stoicism is misguided.
  • Schopenhauer: “For something that calls itself, especially a moral approach to life, for it to make its chief concern to remove something as necessary as suffering is... well, first of all, this is almost paradoxical... it certainly isn’t morality.” (34:10)

• Selfishness and Disconnected Morality (35:40)

  • The Stoic method of dealing with others' suffering (by focusing on their own tranquility) is fundamentally selfish:
  • “The Stoic approach is incredibly selfish by comparison, he says, meaning it’s always all about me feeling less suffering, me, me, me, correcting all my judgments...” (36:00)

• Compassion as True Morality (38:50)

  • For Schopenhauer, compassion begins with feeling the suffering of others, not rationalizing it away.
  • Memorable Turn of Phrase: “Compassion is where true morality begins for Schopenhauer. Far from the cosmopolitanism of Stoicism, which he thought was just a rational duty towards others for yourself, ultimately the word he uses for true compassion literally translates to suffering with.” (39:10)

• The Value of Suffering (41:00)

  • Suffering is valuable: teaches us about striving, loss, compassion, and impermanence.
  • “When you meet it [suffering] head on and are not always trying to fix it, it has the ability to teach us things about the nature of our existence that simply controlling yourself towards predefined virtues can never provide to someone.” (41:30)

• Suffering Twice (42:40)

  • Stoics endure suffering, then heap more suffering upon themselves by striving to suppress it unnaturally.

• The Will and Freedom From Will (45:00)

  • Schopenhauer’s metaphysical concept of the “will”: the deep, blind force driving all striving/thwarted desire.
  • The Stoics’ focus on willing oneself to virtue mirrors, not solves, the restlessness of will.
  • Schopenhauer’s solution: not more willpower, but “freedom from the will” via:
    • Aesthetic contemplation (temporarily suspended striving)
    • Compassion (stepping outside personal desire)
    • Ascetic renunciation (training oneself to quiet the will’s demands)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Nietzsche’s Bird’s-Eye Critique (01:10):

  “Nietzsche thought the Stoics weren’t life affirming enough...and so robbed themselves of the most critical aspects of life. Schopenhauer thought the Stoics were too life affirming of worldly things…”
  — Stephen West, episode introduction

• On Stoic Rationalization (07:55):

  “Nietzsche thinks this is naive. See, he’s more in the camp...where transformation...is something always iterative...not something you can arrive at, or nail down with a set of rational protocols even if you wanted to.”

• On Stoicism’s Moral Limitation (27:30):

  “You just gotta cosplay as Marcus Aurelius every day of your life as a grown adult. Might as well dress up as him for Halloween. This is too passive of an approach to ever be life affirming if you’re Nietzsche.”

• Schopenhauer’s Example of Dullness (39:55):

  “Imagine a person who’s just intellectually dull...they don’t engage deeply...could think...they’re just a wise Stoic, someone that’s cultivated just the right amount of rational acceptance. But...this could just be a selfish, unfeeling person that’s putting in little effort.”

Important Timestamps

• 01:05 — Framing: Nietzsche and Schopenhauer as the “rebuttal” to Stoic worldviews
• 04:20 — Being vs. Becoming: Where metaphysics divides Stoics and Nietzsche
• 09:00 — The Problem of Stoic “Indifference” and Amor Fati
• 14:20 — Critique of Stoic emotional suppression and self-overcoming
• 20:30 — Nietzsche’s “fossilized Stoic” quote and summary condemnation
• 30:00 — Schopenhauer’s critique: Stoicism as suffering-avoidance (post-advertisement segment)
• 36:00 — On the selfishness of Stoic morality
• 41:00 — The instructive power of suffering
• 45:00 — Schopenhauer’s will and “freedom from the will”

Tone and Language

Stephen West maintains his trademark approach: clear, accessible, often witty, and gently provocative. He paraphrases and contextualizes the philosophers’ arguments with relatable examples (e.g., emotional dynamics in a relationship, modern self-help culture) and isn’t afraid to use vivid, occasionally humorous analogies to drive the contrast home (“cosplay as Marcus Aurelius”, “fossilized Stoic way of life”).

Conclusion

By the episode's end, listeners are left with a clearer sense of why Stoicism, while powerfully attractive to many today, faced well-developed critiques from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The Stoic focus on rational control and tranquility is, in Nietzsche’s view, life-denying and self-limiting; to Schopenhauer, it is illusory, selfish, and in denial of suffering's central role in both knowledge and morality.

Host’s Parting Thought (52:55)

“After listening to these two episodes, is there anything from stoicism that’s missing? Is what’s missing from stoicism the very thing that’s attractive about it to you? As always, I leave you to decide where you stand on all this.” — Stephen West

For anyone interested in how philosophical systems grapple with life’s unpredictability and pain, this episode offers a lively, thoughtful challenge to the comfort of Stoic calm.