My favorite philosopher: Arthur Schopenhauer
A mostly uneducated summary of Arthur Schopenhauer, the king of pessimism
I'm in a bad mood today, which means it's the perfect time for me to wax poetic about my favorite philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. I talk about him a lot. The most common response when I mention him is "Who?". The second most common response I get is "Why Schopenhauer? So depressing."
Schopenhauer and I have a lot in common. He was born to rich, cosmopolitan, "liberal" parents, and came of age in the wake of the French Revolution, which is arguably the beginning of the modern era where you could be wealthy, secular, and liberal and do things like take your teenage children on vacations around Europe. This is an era where the West was really finally (again) asking itself questions that Greece and Rome had been asking for millennia, like what it means to be happy or good (particularly in the absence of God telling you what it means to be happy and good).
The purpose of this essay is to encode what I think about Schopenhauer, partly just because I find him really interesting on his own, but also partly to build off of so in future essays I can say something like "reminds me a lot of Schopenhauer", and rather than having to find the original text that supports my perspective, I can just reference this piece. Perhaps it would be more accurate in these cases to say "reminds me of what I remember about Schopenhauer, which itself may have little to do with Schopenhauer Inspired by Nietzsche, another of my favorites, I love going on and on about history in a vague, unreliable way. There are (probably) no citations on this page because I'm basically going on a rant. If anyone were to ever cite this essay, it should only be in the context of "this is what Ben Berman committed to memory and decided to talk about at the time he wrote this", not "this is who Schopenhauer was" or "this is how the world actually worked in the 1800s". There are many books and web pages dedicated to Schopenhauer, and I'm basically paraphrasing them. If you really want to know about Schopenhauer, go read Schopenhauer or a biography of his. All I've actually read of Schopenhauer is a compilation of his most important writings, and I mostly skipped his interest in Buddhism. I'm sure I'll come back to it some day. ".
The most important cornerstone to Schopenhauer's work is something like: "life is miserable". Like me, Schopenhauer spent a lot of his life complaining, I think especially about things like being bored. He witnessed suffering — sometimes extreme suffering, sometimes more mundane — and began to see life and consciousness through the lens of suffering.
He came to view willing (the Will, or the Will to Live) in general as the driving force behind human experience, manifesting blindly as an obsessive impulse towards always wanting more, whether it's more pleasure or less pain, resulting in endless striving. In this way, human experience (consciousness) doesn't experience want or striving; it is striving.
One of my favorite arguments that he makes here is that time flies when you're having fun and crawls when you're in pain. His belief was that this was the Will expressing itself through suffering, that what it means to be conscious is to suffer, yearn, and feel lack. Pleasure is merely the absence of the feeling of lack, which is why time seems to just fly by when we're having fun (because we're not experiencing much at all).
Ok, you don't buy that. "I experience pleasure all the time", you're about to write in the comments section that you didn't know existed. Personally, I agree. I have good memories, and I enjoy doing lots of things! Like reading Schopenhauer! One thing that really struck me while reading him was that his arguments were essentially "we're all miserable all the time", and the whole time, I was grinning ear to ear in agreement. I don't believe in Schopenhauer's metaphysical perspective that consciousness and suffering are essentially identical, and it's a point he holds onto somewhat loosely for the bulk of his "argument Some of my favorite Schopenhauer passages really don't argue anything at all, so much as they are observations and assertions... complaints. His writing reeks of resentment and pettiness, like he begrudges that he has to explain that, obviously, life is misery, and anyone arguing against that is a fool. The only reason he bothers is because the world is filled with fools and, if he didn't waste his time condescending to fools, he would just be alone talking to no one. I love Schopenhauer. ".
Schopenhauer lived and wrote mostly in the early 1800s, when the majority of people were living lives we think of as nearly prehistoric. Most people were illiterate, many were starving, many were sick. Medicine was primitive — germ theory was novel, our understanding of illness was not far off from guessing. Eyeglasses were basically invented in the thirteenth century, but the majority of people wouldn't have had access to them until at least the twentieth. Imagine that, millennia of myopia with no hint that it was resolvable. The human brain — the most interesting, complex machinery ever discovered in the universe, by several orders of magnitude — has spent uncountably many hours toiling in the sun, suffering from illness, unbathed and itchy, riddled with parasites, and it is only monarchs and aristocrats who could reliably assuage these struggles with the potential to see a new work of art or read a book.
And this is to say nothing of our animal cousins. For deer, we can't even really make such
arguments as "it's all worth it for the chance to behold transcendent art".
We managed to evolve out of this hell, to create works of art, politics, religion.
We create meaning, medicine, mechanics, commerce. Deer don't have any of this.
The typical state of the deer is alert, terrified, and hungry. Probably
the best you could argue is that they experience happiness when procreating and with
their children — who die at depressingly high rates — representing a
minuscule portion of their life compared to the incessant heart-racing anxiety, and the
near-inevitable experience of being successfully hunted or breaking their leg and
dehydrating to death while predators and scavengers pick at their body. Did I
get a chance to mention how itchy every animal probably is? All the time? Something
I think about a lot, particularly while scratching Felix
.
He spends more of his writing discussing the reader, the modern man, whose quality of life he rounds up to that of a (male) king: untethered by typical economic woes (like being a peon), not starving, healthy, literate, intelligent, politically empowered. While this isn't globally universal today, this describes pretty much everyone I know. He observes that these men especially argue about happiness; they strive for more and feel the acute suffering of it perhaps more than anyone. This endless striving and desire has been noted extensively by countless religions and philosophies. Even being healthy, wealthy, and educated cannot shut up the yearning and desire that plagues all of life. Some have argued to me that these are the least happy of people, with the happiest being subsistence farmers, traditional or indigenous populations, or the impoverished who believe in God and don't have time to read Schopenhauer to begin with.
Personally, my belief is that we all have an optimistic cognitive bias, but I'm just not going to get into that here. The truth is that "happiness" is a complicated topic that's arguably not worth trying to discuss directly, as it's either not real or some amalgamation of things that are real.
The classic retort is essentially that of Stoicism: master your own mind, reduce your will, and embrace your rational duties, accepting and loving your fate.
To paraphrase Schopenhauer: nice cope For those not terminally online, "cope" is a common retort to a naively optimistic argument in the face of bad news. It's often used by incels and doomers. RIP Schopenhauer you would have loved incel forums. . While Schopenhauer felt that Stoicism and similar "reduce your desires" philosophies made for good life advice, they're essentially based on wishful thinking and bad ideology. Stoicism is predicated on the belief that there is or even could possibly be a stable, pleasant state of mind that accepts the current situation and rationally embraces one's fate. This is an extension of the Just World Hypothesis, an overly internal locus of control, a thread of optimism that has followed psychological philosophy certainly since pre-history. But the universal truth, according to Schopenhauer, is that the natural state of consciousness/life in general is misery, and fighting against that is an illusory, temporary coping mechanism.
Nihilism shares a root with the word annihilate. A fundamental tenet of Stoicism is to eliminate the part of yourself that desires. The reduction of desire cannot result in a positive happiness, just simply less unhappiness. Right? Happiness is a complicated topic, and I don't really believe in reductive concepts like "I am happy" (a fairly new concept to begin with), but from a bean-counter utilitarian perspective, it seems to me that the primary purpose of the reduction of desire is to stop digging yourself into a hole and learn to accept that you will never really be happy.
So maybe you could say we were all on track to accept life-as-suffering and move on from there until Christianity came along, promising a rosier perspective. Suddenly the West stopped being interested in the nebulous concepts of Virtue and Eudaimonia in favor of the comparatively infantile "joy" and "happiness".
But Virtue and Eudaimonia don't really appeal to a transcendental power, or at least not one that I believe in. I think the Greeks and Romans were pretty interested in appealing to the Platonic or Neo-Platonic Good... but I don't believe in such a thing and neither did Schopenhauer. Which I guess compresses down to "nice cope".
The conclusion that I draw from this is not life advice, but just a grander, moral, semi-transcendental reality: life is inescapably filled with misery, there is no true transcendental value to fall back on, and I have yet to find a logical, meaningful argument that really contradicts the following, famous Schopenhauer quote:
If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain, and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.
or, as I would phrase it
There is a whole lot less suffering on the moon than there is on Earth, which makes me kind of jealous of the moon.
The answer I like to give here is "Finally, someone isn't lying to me". I was a pessimistic, often morose kid (I'm sure my mom remembers otherwise, perhaps correctly) who frequently got into arguments about life and happiness. I would often claim that life wasn't worth living, that it isn't worth striving and succeeding in life. I'm definitely not saying that I had Schopenhauer's thesis in my mind at all, but the arguments I got in response seemed painfully lacking. Most people take for granted that life is worth living, that to be alive is to be happy, and they take some level of offense to the contradiction.
Our society and default philosophy has a very optimistic outlook on life. Murder takes precedence over torture and maiming, even though... hey, I'd probably rather be painlessly killed than tortured and maimed. You may disagree with that, but I guess that's one of those "finally, someone's not lying to me" moments.
This does tie into veganism, in that I think the worst thing we do to animals is not killing them but rather forcing them to live, and in particular live in arrangements that are sure to be worse than death. Schopenhauer "preached" an ascetic life. To the best of my knowledge, Schopenhauer would have been a vegan today.
There is much more to say, especially on the nature of happiness and how it relates to our psychology, but that will certainly be the subject of a future essay.
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Unfortunately, I only read Schopenhauer’s The Metaphysics of Sexual Love. I guess I am the opposite. I never worry about others and this world, no matter how old I am, I learn to enjoy the moment like a carefree child. When I walk alone, I start to run to chase the wind when the breeze slides through my hair, I can’t stop being perky when I think of a brilliant business idea and laugh so hard when I see a Jewish man’s shinny bald head in the street. Life to me is the tip toe in my dancing solo, many small moments like this give me peace and happiness. We have very different background, it’s hard for me to understand your pain, your pain is from another class, but I question is emotional pain real, or is it merely a lie we choose to keep telling ourselves until we mistake it for truth so therapists and psychologists can make money from it and rulers can use it to control people? In the aesthetics of literature and art, sorrow and suffering are often regarded as wisdom and profundity, while happiness, in all its lightness, is too easily mistaken for frivolity and foolishness. Why most literatures come down are tragedy instead of comedy? Because rulers want us to believe life is painful, so we have to put up with all the bullshit and pay off our due. I do have my own hard time, but I choose to fight, I keep fighting until I win, I forget my pain after I win and those pains become my materials when I tell jokes and entertain others. In 1998, I watched Titanic with my mom and her colleagues in the movie theater, everyone else cried but not me. I like the western narrative about love and romance, men die for their women and women live their life to the fullest. Well, it is successful propaganda, I want a white man since 4 years old. If Chinese made this movie, Rose would die for love. In your version of deer moms, they are sad and struggle to live because a lot of their babies are dead, in my version of deer moms, they finally get rid of weak and lamb babies, and their surviving babies are the strongest and smartest. My point is, there are always other narratives, you believe what you want to believe. If we compare happiness with grades, it’s easy to improve my grade from 20 to 80 by moving from Ohio, China to New York, USA, but it’s hard to improve your grade from 95 to 100. For me life is a journey worth taken, without agony I don’t know what happiness tastes like.
I also used to think of happiness as a derivative of state (i.e. improving your state in life is what happiness is). I don't really think that anymore. Perhaps deer moms should be happy, but evolution does not select for deer moms who are happy that their children die - it selects for deer moms who want to protect their children at all costs, beyond the safety that nature provides, most of the time. You would enjoy Nietzsche and perhaps you will enjoy my post about Nietzsche, when ever I decided to actually write it.
Animal moms will protect their kids at all costs, but the fact is deer moms lose to lion moms and bullets, so the earth doesn’t revolve by our kindness, female needs to be stronger and smarter to protect their kids. If every mom is as strong and aggressive as lions, tigers or wolves, nobody has guts to pull the trigger.Female animals are stronger than male animals. Unlike animals, female humans cede their power to male humans. From this perspective, humans are more pathetic than animals. I am still in my surviving mode and so are most people, I understand your frustration about the existance and meaning of life and you try to do something (veganism, music, social) to fight against nihility. Happiness should not be expensive but in America it is. I am nostalgic for 1990s and early 2000. Capitalism has produced precedeted isolation and alienation. I would live in an untrod forest and be a writer when I don’t have any financial and green card pressure.I thought of a French word: créer. I still have the desire to create something,to make something happen, to bring something into being where nothing existed before. You have to find your secret real desire, the unfullfilled desire makes you sad and empty. Looking forward to your new post.