ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

1788-1860

We live in a room that has a dark corner. The shadows are there and we know they are there; but we will not look their way. We busy ourselves with a thousand things that are doubtless important; we sit by the lamp and are doubtless full of cheerful thoughts. It is held to be wise to behave in this way, and if the things we busy ourselves with are really important then it may be admitted that our conduct is really wise. But back there among the shadows, the darkest of them all, lurks the spirit of questioning. “What is the use?” it keeps asking, “What is the use?” If we listen we are lost, yet those who have listened and lost themselves tell us that there is such peace to be had of knowing the worst that compared with it the prizes of struggling life are but children’s toys.

“To see where the worst problems of life lie,” writes a philosopher of our own day, “is a very black experience. And yet, so much does human reason live on insight that I have never met a man who was alive to those deepest problems and who repented him of his insight.”[9]

Now the one to whom of all men this insight into the deep abyss has been vouchsafed was Arthur Schopenhauer. According to the older ideas of tragedy, the world has at times and in spots seemed sad enough; but Schopenhauer invented a new conception of tragedy, more ingeniously painful than any that had gone before, and then he showed that the play which most completely set forth this idea was just the whole of life.

The work in which this thought is most systematically developed bears the double title, “On the World as Will and Idea (Vorstellung),” whose first edition appeared in 1818. We may safely confine ourselves to this single work in our present study of Schopenhauer, for his life was one of those lives that move rapidly to a moment of maturity then subside into a ruminating reflection on their achievement.

To have reached at thirty a life-view from which one never afterwards departs might be taken to argue either a certain shallowness of mind or an unusual depth of conviction. One recalls the sixty-year-old Kant, painfully struggling with a bare theory of method, and then for some twenty years more laboring to apply this method to the problems of life with results so vigorously reacting on the method itself as to have created a suspicion of change of view. It is certain that in contrast with Kant, Schopenhauer leaves an impression of facility in thought and style. This effect is no doubt partly to be accounted for by a difference in upbringing and in the circumstances surrounding production. Kant was the very complete university professor; Schopenhauer, a man of the world whose one early experiment in academic life was a most convincing failure. He alone of all the great names that recognize Kant as master--Fichte, Schelling, Hegel--had the assured position and material means to spare himself the laborious training of one who would enter the academic lists. Free then to live as he would, he develops the tastes and the methods of the private scholar of means, reflecting the experience of an easy bachelor existence of inns, and travel, and wide unsystematic reading.

It is the early training doubtless of one intended for a higher social stratum, that imposes on Schopenhauer a sense of obligation to be lordly; a style that is free, rather grand, perhaps a bit overdressed; a certain insolence of tone from which even his friends suffer at times, and which when it is question of his enemies sinks to a level of abuse whose epithets must be shadowed forth with initial and dash.

But apart from these external conditions, one recognizes in Schopenhauer the spirit of the fighter rather than that of the critic. He is a man of one idea, embraced as soon as encountered, then defended with boldness and eloquence and wit. Such a character hardly develops the great thinker; but it may well be possessed of a great thought. The thought of Schopenhauer is none the less great for being gloomy and repellant.

* * * * *

The double title, “The World as Will and Idea,” hints at a double aspect that experience presents, the one to the eye of the observer, the other to the mind of the thinker. To the observing eye, it is a spread of bodies in space and time, obeying the laws of mechanical necessity; just such a world as Kant has described in his “Kritik der reinen Vernunft.” Schopenhauer, following Kant, calls this the world of appearance, the phenomenal world.

But when we say “a world of appearances” we seem to hint at a something that appears, and appears not to the eye that follows the mechanical behavior of bodies in space and time but as revealed to the thought of one who asks: Wherefore this agitated phenomenon? Just as, watching my neighbor move and gesticulate, I ask myself: What is it all about? so, seeing Nature a-quiver, I ask myself: What does she mean? And just as my neighbor’s conduct is understood when I have caught the purpose, the motive that inspires it, so I may be expected to have reached the “real nature” of the fleeting world if I can but find the _will_ which it expresses.

It is then the World as Will that profoundly interests Schopenhauer, as it has profoundly interested all men, from the most primitive that have implored the gods, to the most cautiously reflective who, like Kant, have felt confident of at least this much, that no definition of a good life was possible that did not postulate a world-purpose.

Now the plainest man can assure himself that there are enough--alas, too many--purposes to be found in nature for the looking. There are mine and yours, that of our country, of our human race, of other races too, for the lower animals have disputed the world with us, as the vegetables have disputed it with them. But when one asks oneself: What ultimate purpose is served by all this disputing for a foothold? then indeed one’s imagination is put to the test. There are too many purposes, there is too little purpose, to let this search for nature’s will with us end in a quick and happy finding.

All this is matter of common knowledge and common experience, yet how few have had the courage to give up hope in an ultimate happy finding, and how easily is this hope deceived with dreams, how willingly does it dispense with proof. Here indeed is the region in which “the heart has its reasons that the reason does not understand.” Well, it is Schopenhauer’s great act of courage that the purpose he was unable to find he refused to hope for; the reason that the reason could not understand he closed his heart to. Resolutely, he searched the dark corner and finally stared at the shadow.

“Everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict and alternation of victory.”

“Every kind of being fights for the matter, the space, and the time of the others. This strife may be followed throughout the whole of nature, but most distinctly in the animal kingdom. For the animals have the whole of the vegetable kingdom for their food, while within the animal kingdom every beast is the prey and food of another. So does the will to live everywhere prey upon itself till finally we come to the human race. This, because it subdues all others, regards nature as a manufactory of things for its use. Yet even the human race reveals within itself with terrible distinctness the same conflict; the same variance with itself of the will to live, and we cry _homo homini lupus_.”[10]

This picture of universal warfare is the first scene in Schopenhauer’s world-tragedy; but it is far from the climax. It is in itself not even tragic, for is it not an aspect of nature that however much it may suggest of defeat and suffering it must reveal just as much of triumph and glory? For every victim a victor, and may we not suppose that some principle of justice awards the pains and pleasures of it all?

But no, Schopenhauer goes relentlessly on. The conqueror is crowned with vanity and his spoils are illusions:

“The inner being of nature is a striving without rest and without respite.... a willing and striving that may very well be compared to an unquenchable thirst. But since the basis of all willing is need, deficiency and thus pain, the nature of brute and man alike is originally and of its very essence subject to pain. If on the other hand, it is deprived of objects of desire through too easy satisfaction, such void and ennui fills the heart that existence becomes an unbearable burden to it. Thus life swings like a pendulum from pain to ennui, from ennui to pain.” And Schopenhauer finds an odd unconscious recognition of this truth in the popular imaginings concerning heaven and hell. “After man had transferred all pain and torments to hell,” he notes with an amused cynicism, “there then remained nothing but ennui to furnish heaven with.”

The survivor of the struggle for existence is on these terms hardly a being to be envied, and the “_terque quaterque beati_” must often come to his lips as he recalls those who have fallen. Indeed, it is exactly that place in the scale of existence which gives advantage in the struggle, that brings with it a consciousness of the vanity of this same struggle. It is exactly to man, who in his moment of pride has thought nature a “manufactory of things for his use,” that is given the most poignant sense of alternating hunger and satiety. This most necessitous of all beings “stands upon the earth, left to himself, uncertain about everything except his own lack and misery. Consequently the care for the maintenance of that existence under exacting demands which are renewed every day occupies as a rule the whole of human life. To this is directly related a second claim, the propagation of the species. Here he is threatened from all sides by the most different kinds of danger, from which it requires constant watchfulness to escape. With cautious steps and casting anxious glances around he pursues his path--thus he went as a savage, thus he goes in civilized life; and there is no security for him.

“Qualibus in tenebris vitae, quantisque periclis Degitur hoc oevi, quodcumquest.

“Life is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools which man avoids with the greatest care and solicitude, although he knows that even if he succeeds in getting through with all his efforts and skill, he comes thus but the nearer at every tack to the greatest, the total, the inevitable shipwreck, death.”

And Schopenhauer rounds off the whole with these lines, “Thus, between desiring and attaining all human life flows on. The wish is in its nature pain, the attainment ... satiety: the end is an illusion and possession takes away charm. The wish, the need, presents itself under a new form, or when it does not, follows desolateness, emptiness, ennui against which the conflict is just as painful as against want.” And just as the superior animal is the most suffering of all animals, so the superior man is the most suffering of all men. The calm joy of science, the pleasure of the beautiful, the delight in art--“these things demanding rare talents are granted to very few, and to those few only as a passing dream. And then even these few on account of their higher intellectual power are made susceptible of far greater suffering than duller minds can ever feel. Moreover such men are placed in lonely isolation by a nature obviously different from that of others, so that here too accounts are squared.”

As for the ordinary man, his being “is a weary longing and complaining, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to death--accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts.”

“Every human being and his course of life is but another short dream of the endless spirit of nature, the persistent will to live; is only another fleeting form which [nature] carelessly sketches in its infinite pages ... allows to remain for a time so short it vanishes into nothing ... and then obliterates to make new room.”

* * * * *

From a previous passage touching on the life and character of Schopenhauer it may have been gathered that his was no very lovable personality. And being unlovable, it is not surprising that he was little loved; neither by wife nor child, which he had not; neither by mother nor sister, which he had and offended; nor yet by close friends which if he had for a moment he usually managed to estrange. It is true, perhaps, that his dog loved him, the inseparable poodle whom the children of the neighborhood used to call der junge Schopenhauer, for the tenderest side of Schopenhauer’s make-up was turned toward dumb animals. But the love of a dog is a poor substitute for all other loves, and it is not surprising that certain minds to whom optimism is a foregone conclusion should have dismissed Schopenhauer with the observation that to him who looks through clouded glasses the world must needs be dark.

If we are tempted to make this easy comment, we should remember the note that Schopenhauer is never tired of appending to his pages, the reminder that he stands not alone but is the expression of whole races and civilizations. He is heir to the deep pessimism of the East, of Brahminism, of Buddhism, that called life a “veil of illusion,” and figured one attached to its purposeless turning as “tied to the wheel of things.” He is the voice of that Christianity that fled to the desert, and hid itself in monasteries. He could repeat after the “Imitation of Christ,” “Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth. The more spiritual a man desires to be, the more bitter does this life become to him; because he sees more clearly and perceives more sensibly the defects of human corruption. For to eat and to drink, to sleep and to watch, to labor and to rest, to be subject to the necessities of nature is a great misery and affliction to a religious man, who would gladly be set loose.”

No, Schopenhauer did not stand alone--the past was behind him, and as it proved the future ready for his message. Not merely among the technical philosophers is his influence to be traced, but in that sensitive expression of what is passing in the heart of his age--the artist. Never has art had the courage it now displays to conceive the tragedy of life as Schopenhauer thought it out--not indeed the drama of guilt and its punishment, the ideal of justice working itself out at the cost of individual pain. This is the older conception of tragedy--Schopenhauer would say it is not tragedy at all. To the modern conception tragedy lies in the perception that there _is_ no justice in the world--only indifference, only chance, only stupidity. One might cite works of Flaubert, tales of Maupassant, pages of Anatole France; but most notable of all, pretty much the whole literary output of Thomas Hardy, that tireless recorder of “Life’s Little Ironies,” that bold acknowledger of crass casualty as the only god of things. Schopenhauer does not stand alone against a background of forgotten gloom if one may still hear the voice of nature questioning as Hardy heard it:

“When I look forth at dawning, pool, Field, flock, and lonely tree All seem to look at me Like chastened children sitting silent in a school.

“Their faces dulled, constrained and worn, As though the master’s ways Through the long teaching days Their first terrestrial zest had chilled and overborne.

“And on them stirs, in lippings mere (As if once in clear call, But now scarce breathed at all) ‘We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here.

“‘Has some vast Imbecility Mighty to build and blend But impotent to tend Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardy?’

“Thus things around. No answer I ...”

It is time we come to the question: What then? Life is a misery, and then what?

“The door is open,” said Marcus Aurelius. “The door is open, if the house is smoky, leave it.” It is the solution of antiquity, and Schopenhauer himself finds it much more reasonable than most of the reasons that have been urged against it. Yet it is not through this easily opened door that he sees a way of escape from the ironic will to live. If that will had a date and a local habitation, then indeed to kill the body in which it dwelt would put an end to the monster. But such is not the case. Among the accidents of time and space you happen to be one; but had you not been one, or were you no longer one, the game would play itself out by the same rules, only another pawn would be on the spot that was yours. Now the evil of the game is not that _you_ happen to be one of the pieces, but rather that it should be played at all. Not the pawn, but the player must be killed, and the player is always that brutal Will to Live, pitted against itself, winning as it loses and losing as it wins. Step out of it if you will, what does he care? But stay in it, and by doing your part not with but against him you may not only emancipate yourself but have your share in putting an end to the game itself. What is this part to be played by each against the Will to Live? We shall come to Schopenhauer’s account of it in due time, meanwhile it is certainly _not_ the impatient gesture of self-destruction.

From the past again comes another answer to the question: What then? It takes the form of a wine song, and we catch its refrain from the lips of singer after singer. “Another and another cup,” cries Omar, “to drown the memory of this insolence.”

Well, for this solution too Schopenhauer has his sympathy. Not for the wine that is red, to be sure,--its intoxication is too brief, the awakening too bitter--but for the wine of beauty wherever it is to be found in nature or in art. It is most natural that Schopenhauer--for whom the woe of life springs from the possession of an aggressive, fighting selfhood--should have looked for solace to that beauty in which, we say, we forget ourselves, before which we stand rapt. The effect every one knows--the cause? That was Schopenhauer’s peculiar contribution to the theory of the beautiful. In a word his explanation is this. We forget our own individuality with all its torment, because we are seduced by the beauty of the thing we look at to forget _its_ individuality.

There is in the Louvre a somewhat dirty piece of marble whose size and weight with the story of how it came to be where it is, may be found in the guide books. This at least is its individual description. But to the many human beings who have stood rapt before the Venus de Milo there has appeared not this dirt, nor yet this marble, nor yet the effigy of a woman; but just the vision of womanhood. And therewith, Schopenhauer would suggest, we have taken a step out of the contentious world. It is no longer a human being but human nature we are in presence of, and to lose oneself in nature is, while the vision lasts, to have forgotten the will to live in its troublesome individuality.

While the vision lasts! But the trouble here is that such visions will _not_ last. In the contemplation of beauty we have the foretaste of peace; but not the peace eternal. And the question comes back upon us: What is to be done?

The answer now in progressive completeness comes from three sources. The first suggestion, imperfect though it is, we catch from the institution of civil law. Now law, and the penalties it provides, is a conscious effort to restrain the individual from doing wrong. “Wrong,” meanwhile, Schopenhauer defines as “that quality of the conduct of an individual in which he extends the assertion of the will appearing in his own body so far that it becomes the denial of the will appearing in the bodies of others.” It is then the province of law to fix as best it can the boundaries that enclose a man’s rights to the exercise of his individual will and to prevent his trespassing or being trespassed upon.

But this rough and partial method of restraining the will to live from multiplying the misery which it creates in proportion as it is untrammeled is but palliative. A deeper suggestion than that offered by formal law comes from an examination of the moral sense. For the distinction between right and wrong as drawn by temporal justice is by no means identical with that between good and bad as intuited by the conscience of man. For wrong, as we have seen, means merely aggression, and right, the exercise of will that commits none of the aggressions law recognizes. But it is by no means enough to keep within one’s rights to possess moral worth. “For example,” our philosopher points out, “the refusal of help to another in great need, the quiet contemplation of the death of another from starvation while we ourselves have more than enough, is certainly cruel and fiendish, but it is not a wrong.”

What then constitutes goodness? The quality of goodness consists in an infinite sympathy, such an intuition of the misery of others as gives us a horror of inflicting pain, a delicate skill in alleviating it. Now all the misery of life comes from the assertion of the individual will, which if justice may indeed feebly hold in check, goodness alone can effectively still by destroying the distinction between soul and soul. “To the noble man,” we find Schopenhauer writing, “this distinction is not significant.... The suffering which he sees in others touches him quite as his own. He therefore tries to strike a balance between them, denies himself pleasures, practices renunciation, in order to mitigate the sufferings of others. He sees that the distinction between himself and others, which to the wicked man is so great a gulf, only belongs to a fleeting and illusive phenomenon. He recognizes directly and without reasoning that the in-itself of his own manifestation is also that of others, the will to live which constitutes the inner nature of everything and lives in all; indeed, that this applies also to the brutes and the whole of nature, and therefore he will not cause suffering even to a brute.” And yet this conception of the good life, this living in sympathy and doing works of love, beautiful as the ideal of it is, is not the final cure for the world’s misery. The will to live, even so chastened, has not lost all of its genius for harm.

“If the veil of Maya,” our thinker has it, “is lifted from the eyes of a man to such an extent that he no longer makes the egotistical distinction between his person and that of another, ... then it clearly follows that such a man, who recognizes all beings as his own inmost and true self, must also regard the infinite suffering of all suffering beings as his own, and take on himself the pain of the whole world.... All the miseries of others which he sees and is so seldom able to alleviate, all the miseries he knows directly, and even those which he only knows as possible, work upon his mind as his own.... Why should he now, with such knowledge of the world assert this very life through constant acts of will, and thereby bind himself ever more closely to it, hug it ever more closely to himself?” Should not rather, we ask, this bitter world-knowledge become a permanent and final _quieter_ of all and of every volition? Should not the will now turn away from life, shuddering at the pleasures it once craved, but in which it has come to recognize that assertion of life which is the fountain of misery?

And Schopenhauer expounds his meaning in a parable. “If we compare life to a course which we must unceasingly run--a path of glowing coals, with a few cool places here and there; then he who is entangled in illusion is consoled by the cool places, on which he now stands or which he sees near him, and sets out to run the course. But he who sees through the [illusion that separates the ‘here’ and ‘there’] and thus recognizes the whole, is no longer susceptible of such consolation; he sees himself at all places at once--and withdraws.”

* * * * *

This is the transition from virtue to asceticism and here we have the last word of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the cure. Suicide is a mistake; enjoyment of beauty a true solace, but a momentary one. Restrictions devised by society are a corrective, but the misery they can prevent is as a drop to an ocean; morality which is at bottom a charity born of sympathy is the best the world has dreamed, it destroys more and more the individual will and makes all things one, but though men in the ideal state morality might produce would suffer together, they would still suffer, for from Schopenhauer’s point of view the disjunction is final; “Either desire unsatisfied, which is pain, or satisfied desire, which is ennui.”

Well, this infinite wretchedness of the man who has made the round of experience in seeking relief, who has rejected suicide, who has awakened from the dream of beauty to find the old pain still there, who has tried, then lost faith in, the devices of law, who has become at last a “Beautiful Soul,” to find himself then the sharer of all the world’s misery,--the infinite wretchedness of such a man is a disease, not of the wrong kind of will, but of will itself. All will is evil will, and if one would have an end of pain one must refuse to will at all; is not this, the asceticism of Indian sage and Christian saint, the oldest and the ultimate wisdom?

Schopenhauer takes his word “asceticism” quite seriously. To this last expression of human insight it no longer suffices that a man should love others as himself and do as much for them as for himself; “but there arises within him a horror of the nature of which his own (phenomenal) existence is an expression, the will to live, the kernel and inner being of that world which is recognized as full of misery. He therefore disowns his own nature which appears in him and is already expressed through his body. His body, healthy and strong, expresses the sexual impulse; but he denies the will and gives the lie to the body. It thereby denies the assertion of the will which extends beyond the individual life, and gives the assurance that with the life of this body, the will, whose manifestation it is, ceases.

“Asceticism shows itself further in voluntary poverty, which not only arises _per accidens_ because the possessions are given away to mitigate the sufferings of others, but is here an end in itself, is meant to serve as a constant mortification of will, so that the satisfaction of the wishes, the sweet of life shall not again arouse the will against which self-knowledge has conceived a horror. He who has attained to this point compels himself to refrain from doing all that he would like to do, and to do all that he would not like to do, even if this has no further end than that of serving as a mortification of will.”[11]

And Schopenhauer becomes the exponent of that aspect of Christianity, as of other ascetic creeds, which is so unintelligible to the pagan ideals of manhood,--the doctrine of meekness. Since the ascetic “himself denies the will which appears in his own person, he will not resist if another does the same, _i.e._ inflicts wrongs upon him. Therefore, every suffering coming to him from without, through chance or the wickedness of others, is welcome, every injury, ignominy, and insult; he receives them gladly as the opportunity of learning with certainty that he no longer asserts the will, but gladly sides with every enemy of the manifestation of will which is his own person.”

In his manner of life the Schopenhauerian ascetic is in every detail a copy of the Eastern and Western monk. His body he nourishes sparingly, lest its excessive vigor should animate the will. When at last death comes, it is most welcome, and is gladly received as a longed-for deliverance. “For him who thus ends, the world has ended also.”

* * * * *

“For him who thus ends, the world has ended also.” The seriousness with which this statement is taken marks the difference between the two great philosophies of asceticism, the Buddhistic and the Christian. Whatever the Master may himself have taught, the Christianity of the Church, say of Augustine, is a pessimism respecting the world we know, backed by an optimism respecting the world we know not, in which however the meaning of the whole plot is made clear. The _nothingness of the world_ as it appears to the eyes of the Christian ascetic is then the nothingness of _this_ world, but for him who leaves it there awaits a much richer life in another. For the Buddhist saint, no optimism of this kind supplements his pessimism, no other world is called upon to explain this one, and when he leaves this one through the door of asceticism it is into the eternal peace of Nirvana, of nothingness, that he sinks.

It is the latter understanding of the outcome that Schopenhauer accepts at the hands of the mystic East. “We have recognized,” he writes, “the inmost nature of the world to be will, and all its phenomena to be but embodiments of the will, and we have followed this embodiment from the unconscious working of the obscure forms of nature up to the completely conscious action of man. Therefore we shall by no means evade the consequence that with the free denial, the surrender of the will, all these phenomena are also abolished; that constant strain and effort without end and without rest at all the grades of objectivity in which and through which the world consists; the multifarious forms succeeding each other in gradation; the whole manifestation of the will and finally the universal forms of this manifestation, time and space, and also its last fundamental form, subject and object, all are abolished. No will: no idea, no world.”

“Before us there is certainly only nothingness,” Schopenhauer concludes, but if this prospect be anything but grateful to a man, it must be because he has not really seen or accepted the truth that Schopenhauer would demonstrate and impart. “That we abhor annihilation,” he insists, “is simply another expression of the fact that we so strenuously will life.” Of that folly and the pain of it enough has been said. “But if we turn our glances from our own needy and embarrassed condition to those who have overcome the world ... then instead of the useless striving and effort, ... instead of the never satisfied and never dying hope which constitutes the life of the man who wills, we shall see that peace which passeth understanding, that perfect calm of the spirit, that deep rest, that inviolable confidence and serenity, the mere reflection of which in the countenance as Raphael or Correggio has represented it is an entire and certain gospel; only knowledge remains, the will has vanished.”

And it is exactly in this way “by contemplation of the life and conduct of saints, whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own experience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written history, and, with the stamp of entire truth, by art, that we may banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark ... What remains after the abolition of the will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but conversely to those in whom the will has denied itself, this world which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways--is nothing.”