Overcoming the Will to Live: An Introduction to Schopenhauer
Part 5

4,324 words

Schopenhauer monument, Frankfurt.

All parts here.

The Tragedy and Comedy of Life

We are continuing our discussion of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy of life. In the fourth book of The World as Will and Representation (“The World as Will: Second Aspect”), he writes, famously, “The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.”[1]

If we look at our lives as a whole, leaving out the details, it is always the same story: man repeatedly seeks happiness in a variety of ways, repeatedly fails, then fails to draw the obvious conclusion from this (that happiness is unattainable), then dies. It’s a sad tale and when we see it played out in the lives of others we feel sympathy – and usually fail to see ourselves in the tale.

However, if we look in detail at an individual life, it plays, Schopenhauer says, like a comedy. All we have to do is to look more carefully at those attempts to attain happiness. Then we all look like dimwitted bumblers. Think of all the comically bad dates. The times you convinced yourself, out of loneliness that someone was a lot better than they actually were (“What was I thinking?” we always ask ourselves later). Think of all the time wasted on work, in the naïve belief that money can buy happiness (no matter how often we are admonished that it cannot, we never really believe this).

Think of all the times we’ve picked up stakes and moved to a new location, believing that “the grass is always greener . . .” (another oft repeated life lesson that no one ever really learns). Think of all the misguided “resolutions” we have made around New Year’s which, if we keep them at all, never really change anything. Think of the vast amount of money we lay out on consumer goods, believing that the next gadget is really going to enrich our lives. Think of all the money spent on plastic surgeries.

We are complete and utter fools. We are the central characters in a long-running comedy of errors, only we don’t realize it and we don’t think it the least bit funny. “Thus,” Schopenhauer writes, “as if fate wished to add mockery to the misery of our existence, our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but, in the broad detail of life, are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy.”[2]

The reader may have wondered what Schopenhauer thinks of religion. His position is actually quite unsurprising. Religion, Schopenhauer believes, is born of man’s recognition that he cannot completely control his own environment and thus cannot guarantee happiness. “Man creates for himself in his own image demons, gods, and saints; then to these must be incessantly offered sacrifices, prayers, temple decorations, vows and their fulfilment, pilgrimages, salutations, adornment of images and so on.”[3]

Schopenhauer, in other words, is an atheist. Because we cannot deal with the unpredictability and, indeed, the meaninglessness of life, we create religion, which serves as a comforting illusion. We propitiate the gods for happiness and success in life, and no matter how many times they fail to deliver, we keep on believing. The alternative to this is too terrible for most men to bear, for it would mean accepting that we are alone in a meaningless universe that cares nothing at all about our lives and our fates. The purposelessness of the will makes life meaningless for Schopenhauer. I have always been puzzled by the fact that he is not more widely regarded as a proto-existentialist.

If you thought the foregoing was pessimistic, you haven’t seen anything yet. Schopenhauer tells us that life is so bad, no one on their death bed would choose to go through with it again (I’m not sure he’s right about that, however). He tells us that complete non-existence would be preferable to existence, and notes that “the shortness of life, so often lamented, may perhaps be the very best thing about it.”[4]

If we were to conduct the most hardened and callous optimist through hospitals, infirmaries, operating theatres, through prisons, torture-chambers, and slave-hovels, over battlefields and to places of execution; if we were to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it shuns the gaze of cold curiosity, and finally were to allow him to glance into the dungeon of Ugolino where prisoners starved to death, he too would certainly see in the end what kind of a world is this meilleur des mondes possibles [best of all possible worlds]. For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours?

Note this odd characterization of the optimist as “hardened” and “callous.” This is not how we normally think of such a person. In fact, we expect that it would be the pessimist who would possess such traits. But, from Schopenhauer’s perspective it makes perfect sense to think of the optimist in these terms. For Schopenhauer, the only way a mature man can be an optimist is to ignore and dismiss the suffering of his fellow men! Thus, Schopenhauer says that

Optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind. Let no one imagine that the Christian teaching is favourable to optimism; on the contrary, in the Gospels world and evil are used almost as synonymous expressions.[5]

Right and Wrong

In the next section, Schopenhauer goes into more detail concerning the affirmation and denial of the will. Affirmation of the will essentially consists in affirmation of the body and its drives. This is easily understood, and Schopenhauer holds up the sex drive as the strongest expression of bodily urges. His discussion of this matter leads him to revisit the topic of ethics. Unlike other philosophers, Schopenhauer explains that he does not begin with a concept of right (Recht) but with a concept of wrong (Unrecht).

Essentially, wrong for Schopenhauer is when I deny the will that appears in the body of another or interfere with his ability to affirm his will. An example would be the fate of Ugolino della Gherardesca, Count of Donoratico (c. 1214-March 1289), to whom Schopenhauer alludes in a passage quoted earlier. Accusing Ugolino of treachery, the Archbishop of Pisa sealed him, his two sons, and two grandsons in a tower and then ordered the keys thrown into the Arno river. Ugolino and the four other prisoners starved to death.

According to legend, Ugolino ate the bodies of his children before expiring himself. However, forensic examination of the bodies, which were exhumed in 2002, does not support this. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine a fate worse than slow starvation (though being burned alive tops my own list of ways I’d least like to go). It is also difficult to imagine a clearer example of thwarting another man’s ability to affirm his will. As noted, Schopenhauer named the sex drive as the strongest expression of bodily will, but I suspect that it is actually the drive to eat. No one has ever gone mad from lack of sex, but lack of food always eventually leads to madness.

In support of his position, Schopenhauer says, first of all, that thwarting the ability of another to pursue his will or drives is universally recognized as wrong. However, in the technical terms of his philosophy, it is wrong because it is a denial of the identity of the self and the other, in whom will is one. Recall that Schopenhauer argues that things are only many or distinct in the world as it appears to us. Beyond the appearances, however, only the thing-in-itself exists – only will exists – and all apparent multiplicity is an appearance of will. This means that, in fact, I and the other are one, and have one will. When I do harm to another or thwart his expression of will, I am denying this metaphysical identity.

The consummate form of wrong, Schopenhauer says, is cannibalism. But he mentions also murder, mutilation, and subjugation. In each of these cases, I am refusing to see myself in the other; to see that we are one. Recognizing my identity with the other ought to lead to the feelings of sympathy, empathy, and compassion. This is what is missing in all cases of wrong. The recognition that I and the other are one is a matter to which we will return later.

What about theft? Why would it be wrong, according to Schopenhauer? The possessions of another are expressions of his will, the means by which he accomplishes his will. For example, suppose I am in possession of equipment I use to till the soil in order to cultivate plants, which I use to satisfy my drive to eat. If you steal this equipment from me, you are interfering with my expression of will.

For similar reasons, Schopenhauer argues that lying and breaking contracts is wrong. If I deceive you into forfeiting some value, I have interfered with your expression of will, your drive to satisfy your own desires, perhaps by robbing you of the necessary means for that expression. We can see from this that Schopenhauer’s ethics is not far removed from the classical liberalism of thinkers like Locke or Jefferson. Essentially, Schopenhauer is championing our right to be let alone, to pursue happiness (i.e., to pursue what the will desires). The basic concept in Schopenhauer’s ethics is actually wrong; right is, in a way, derivative. There would be no ideas of right if there were no wrong. And, again, wrong is simply whatever interferes with another’s exercise of will. It follows, therefore, that it is right to refrain from so interfering.

As an ethics, this certainly seems to leave a lot out, however. For example, there is no idea here of an obligation to aid, and Schopenhauer admits this. If I sit and watch another starve or die and do nothing to help him, technically this is not wrong for Schopenhauer. As with classical liberalism, our obligations to others are purely negative. I am obliged, in other words, to leave others alone, but not to go out of my way to help them.

The similarity between Schopenhauer’s views and classical liberal political theory does not end there. He says that the need for the state arises because we know that people will do wrong. So, we must establish an authority to preserve peace and rectify wrongdoing. Essentially, Schopenhauer endorses social contract theory. We lay aside our right to revenge, for instance, and invest it in the state.

Schopenhauer observes that all forms of state have their problems. A republic tends to anarchy; monarchy to despotism. A perfect state would require humans trained to sacrifice their selfish good for the sake of the whole. However, it seems unlikely that we will ever reach the perfect state. Until then, Schopenhauer says, we can settle for the next best thing: hereditary monarchy.

In essential terms, hereditary monarchy is a situation where one family has its interest inseparably bound to the interest of the nation. This is a very stable form of state because the transition of power is determined in advance, and those in power, having their familial interest tied to the interest of the whole, will tend to act for the good of all. And, contrary to popular belief, the despotisms of so-called democratic states are far worse than those of monarchies, as we saw in the last century.

Schopenhauer tells us that the state is responsible for temporal justice. But human beings also have a conception of eternal justice, and Schopenhauer endorses this idea. At first glance, it is difficult to see how someone who believes that all that exists is an expression of a remorseless, striving will could entertain a conception of cosmic justice. Shouldn’t Schopenhauer reject such a conception and affirm that there is no justice in the cosmos, just as there is no meaning?

But Schopenhauer can affirm a concept of cosmic justice, if he takes the position that everything that happens to us is deserved. This is, indeed, the position he takes. In a sense, justice is always being done to individuals. If we look at the world as a whole, and at all the errors of humans, and weigh them against all the suffering they produce, the scale balances out. In short: we deserve it.

Since everything is an expression of will, there is no fundamental distinction between one thing and another. So how can there be a redressing of wrongs? Schopenhauer holds that the suffering of “others” is really our own, a very Buddhist way of looking at things. Perhaps the only sort of “justice” we can expect is a correction of imbalance, something like Anaximander’s conception of justice. In the first extant fragment of Western philosophy, Anaximander writes “The things that are perish into the things from which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time.”[6]

Anaximander theorized that all that exists emerges from an indefinite stuff he called apeiron (which simply means indefinite or infinite). The fragment seems to suggest that the very existence of things, their coming forth from the apeiron, is an act of injustice. But in due course, “having paid penalty for their injustice,” they are reabsorbed into the apeiron and something new comes to stand. So it is with will and what emerges from will. All of existence is injustice and the only “redress” is when things pass away and are replaced by others.

Choosing Annihilation

The last forty pages or so of book four are among the most important parts of The World As Will and Representation. Here, Schopenhauer elaborates still more on his ethical theory and also gives us his most developed answer to the question of how we can rise above the will.

He repeats the claim that moral theory is of no real value for making people moral. Moral reasoning cannot actually motivate us to be moral, unless it somehow appeals to self-interest. But Schopenhauer follows Kant in holding that what springs from self-interest has no moral worth at all. A moral act is one chosen because we see that it is good, not because we see that we can derive some selfish benefit from it. Nor can goodness depend on such unstable things as dogmas and ideologies, which are easily undermined by critical thought.

No, the only well spring of virtue is our intuitive knowledge “that recognizes in another’s individuality the same inner nature as in one’s own.”[7] The good person sees beyond the principium individuationis or, as Schopenhauer also puts it (drawing on Indian philosophy) “the veil of maya,” and recognizes that he and the other are one. “For the veil of maya has become transparent for the person who performs works of love, and the deception of the principium individuationis has left him.”[8] (The principium individuationis is the “principle of individuation,” which for Schopenhauer is space-time.)

These “works of love” becomes a kind of yoga for Schopenhauer: a way to surrender the will to live. In works of love, we rise above our will and its drives, setting aside our own desires to tend to the needs of others. There follow a great deal of references not just to Indian philosophy but to Western mystics such as Angelus Silesius and Meister Eckhart, all of it having to do with surrendering the will to live. What Schopenhauer discusses in these pages is difficult for most people to understand.

He is describing a kind of prolongation of the state of release (and bliss) achieved in aesthetic contemplation (as discussed in part three of this series). Schopenhauer speaks of how it is possible to come to a point in life where one simply ceases to will. He uses the example of the sexual impulse: it is possible for someone to arrive at a point where they simply no longer seek sexual satisfaction. How? And why? For Schopenhauer, it comes through realization of the futility of willing, the futility of acquiescing to the will. To illustrate this, he uses the story of Ramon Lull,

who had long wooed a beautiful woman, was at last admitted to her chamber, and was looking forward to the fulfilment of all his desires, when, opening her dress, she showed him her bosom terribly eaten away with cancer. From that moment, as if he had looked into hell, he was converted; leaving the court of the King of Majorca, he went into the wilderness to do penance.[9]

Schopenhauer speaks a great deal about asceticism and self-mortification of various kinds – and he speaks with approval. He quotes Madame Guyon, one of his favorite authors, who wrote, “Everything is indifferent to me; I cannot will anything more; often I do not know whether I exist or not.”[10] Clearly, we are dealing here with something very much like the Buddhist concept of moksha, or “release.”

Now, the preceding may have led the reader to think that suicide is the best option! But Schopenhauer argues that suicide is actually an affirmation of the will. In choosing suicide, one is really acting out of love of life. One behaves as if one wants to exchange a bad situation for a better one. It is as if one says “I will be better off if I just kill myself.” The “as if” is important here because, of course, if anyone thought this way consciously and explicitly they would never go through with the act. Nevertheless, the act is chosen, effectively, as self-improvement. It is chosen not out of resignation, but out of self-love.

For Schopenhauer, the will can only be abolished by knowledge. Again, this is very similar to Buddhism, which teaches that only through knowledge of our condition can we overcome it. The will must appear to us freely and without hindrance in order that we may recognize its nature, and the hold it has on us. Actually, to put things more precisely, the will must appear to itself in order that it may recognize its own nature. Remember that we ourselves are expressions of will. Thus, when we come to knowledge of will, this is the same thing as will achieving knowledge of itself. And if, through this knowledge, we reject will, then will rejects itself. Brought finally to knowledge of itself, will recoils from itself in disgust and chooses self-negation.

Schopenhauer thus presents us with a kind of pessimistic twist on Hegel. Hegel had taught that the purpose or end of existence is its becoming conscious of itself through human spirit, and that this self-consciousness of existence is equivalent to God. In Schopenhauer’s version, the grades of will’s manifestation issue, ultimately, in humanity. Through man, will achieves consciousness of itself – but effectively it sees itself as a devil or demiurge, not God. Brought to self-knowledge, will rejects itself. One could thus argue that for Schopenhauer the purpose or end of existence is precisely existence (which is just will) willing its own end, its cessation. For Schopenhauer, the only real justice in the world would be the world’s annihilation.

He closes book four with the following words:

[We] freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.

Conclusion

Volume One of The World as Will and Representation ends with an appendix titled “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy.” Readers often skip this, and it need not detain us here. In covering books one through four, we have covered all the key ideas in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. As noted in part one, the second volume of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus consists in elaborations and elucidations of the material in the first volume. These are often brilliant, and well worth reading, but I have not drawn upon them in the foregoing.

We began this series by noting Heidegger’s rather dismissive attitude toward Schopenhauer. It is quite true that Schopenhauer is not a philosopher of the first rank. He is not in the same league as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel. And it is also true that he has nothing profound to contribute to the history of Western metaphysics, and that his own metaphysical position rests on a misunderstanding of Kant.

Nevertheless, if the reader has followed me all this way, he has surely noticed that Schopenhauer is frequently a profound “philosopher of life.” No doubt at least a few of the lines I’ve quoted in this series have resonated with the reader. Many will be unable to follow Schopenhauer all the way in his extreme pessimism. But it is undeniable that Schopenhauer has a great deal of insight into the tragic aspect of human existence. This is the primary reason for his wide influence. And many men, on reaching middle age, have found great solace in reading Schopenhauer.

In closing, I would like to briefly draw the reader’s attention to an interesting parallel between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Heidegger’s, one that Heidegger likely did not perceive. In his later philosophy, Heidegger develops a concept of “will” (Wille; I have written about this extensively in my series “Heidegger, Schelling, and the Reality of Evil”). Now, one must be very careful not to make too much of this. The fact that Heidegger used the same word as Schopenhauer does not mean that they meant the same thing by it, and it is certainly not evidence of influence. This is especially true given that Wille is a common word in German.

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But can any meaningful parallels be drawn between Schopenhauer’s will and Heidegger’s? For Heidegger the will is a perennial tendency in human beings to strive to master or overcome otherness. It is basically synonymous with what I have called in my series on Heidegger’s history of metaphysics “the metaphysics of presence.” Heidegger believes that the entire history of metaphysics is willful, in that he discerns a concealed anthropocentrism at the “essential core” of the metaphysical tradition. Further, in his postwar writings Heidegger identifies will with evil and sees this evil at work everywhere in the modern world.

To be sure, Heidegger’s conception of will is quite unlike Schopenhauer’s. Unlike Schopenhauer, Heidegger does not regard will as the thing-in-itself, as the “inner being” of all things, nor does he regard it effectively as a plastic medium which gives rise to the multiplicity that appears to our senses. Heidegger puts forth no such metaphysical conception. Nor does he hold will to be a timeless category. Instead, for Heidegger will seems to first enthrall human beings with the advent of the Greek metaphysical tradition.

Nevertheless, like Schopenhauer, Heidegger regards will precisely as something to which we are in thrall. Heidegger does not see will as a human “trait” that is somehow under our control. Instead, he sees our willful regarding of beings as yet another “dispensation of being.” Put simply, it is a way of understanding the being of beings that we find ourselves within, or find ourselves thinking and living in terms of. We imagine that we are the authors of historical epochs; of new ways of regarding beings. In fact, the origin of these is quite mysterious, and does not come about through conscious human acts. In short, we do not “have” will, it has us. And it is evil.

What is Heidegger’s answer to will? Remarkably, it is quite similar to Schopenhauer’s. It is Gelassenheit. Literally, this could be translated as “leavingness” in the sense of “letting-alone-ness,” but Heideggereans often translate it as “letting beings be.” The origin of the term is usually credited to Meister Eckhart, who was an important influence on Heidegger – and on Schopenhauer.

In Eckhart’s thought, there is a fundamental identity between the human soul and God (or the “Godhead”). God, in his innermost nature, is conceived as that in virtue of which things have their being. As a result, God himself is no-thing. When our souls are occupied with the busy-ness of the world and all its things, we cannot come to a realization (a making real) of our identity with God. But if the soul is emptied (in effect, a kind of “ego death”) then it too becomes no-thing, and there is no longer any difference between the soul and God. This emptying of the soul is Gelassenheit – or, as Eckhart also calls it, Abgeschiedenheit, “detachment.”

For Heidegger, Gelassenheit or “letting beings be” is a negation of egoic willfulness: the will to distort all beings into appearing to us as nothing more than resources for satisfying our needs or desires. This willfulness is evil because it is an annihilation of the being beings have, an insistence on imposing upon them a distortion of what they truly are. Willfulness effectively raises man to godlike status and declares that beings have no being until we impose some being (some meaning) upon them. They are mere “raw material.”

The parallels between Heidegger’s Gelassenheit and Schopenhauer’s cessation of willing are too obvious to require further comment. Perhaps we should add Heidegger’s name to the long list of writers – many of whom were Heidegger’s contemporaries – directly or indirectly influenced by Schopenhauer.

Notes

[1] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 322. (Henceforth, WWR 1.)

[2] WWR 1, 322.

[3] WWR 1, 323.

[4] WWR 1, 325.

[5] WWR 1, 326.

[6] Patricia Curd, Ed., A Presocratics Reader, 2nd edition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2011), 17.

[7] WWR 1, 368.

[8] WWR 1, 373.

[9] WWR 1, 394-395.

[10] WWR 1, 391.