On the Suffering of the World
by Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by Eugene Thacker, Repeater Books, 313 pages, $14.95
Really, I’ve done my best to keep up my spirits during this past sorely trying year of pandemic and traumatizing politics. I’ve weeded my books and sorted my papers, written about comic novels and escapist fiction in a weekly column, helped care for my wife who smashed up her ankle last fall, with attendant complications and surgeries. Above all, like most people, I’ve done my best not to get sick and not to go crazy. But the Jan. 6 assault on Congress was one straw too many.
What better calm than the consolation of philosophy? As it happened, I was recently sent a selection from Arthur Schopenhauer’s later writings, On the Suffering of the World, edited by Eugene Thacker, a professor at the New School in Manhattan.
On the surface, that title doesn’t sound precisely comforting, but I hoped the book might provide needed perspective on our anguished, heartbreaking times. Besides, years ago, I had enjoyed some of Schopenhauer’s literary essays — “On Authorship,” “On Style” — and been particularly taken with his lively, aphoristic prose and his advocacy of clarity, simplicity, and brevity when we write. He’d even warned against too much bookishness, acidly likening reading to thinking with someone else’s head instead of one’s own. Alas, having completely ignored that advice since the age of 5, I sometimes wonder if I’ve ever had an original thought in my life.
On the Suffering of the World, I soon discovered, views the nature of things more from a cosmic standpoint than a stoic one. Though written in the style of the hipster academic, Thacker’s introductory essay insightfully sketches the biographical and intellectual context of Schopenhauer’s distinctly zestful reflections on the vanity of life, the fear of death, and humankind’s place in the universe. Much of the philosopher’s thought turns out to resemble classical Eastern teaching: The author of The World as Will and Representation kept both a statue of Buddha and a bust of Kant on his desk.
Life, according to Schopenhauer, consists of ceaseless motion and restlessness, caused by what he calls the Will-to-Live, a fundamental drive that originates in the body and is mainly directed toward food or sex. Because we are dominated by this primal, instinctual egoism, it is desire, not reason, that ruthlessly controls our actions. Throughout life, we are tirelessly harried from want to want, never finding permanent satisfaction in anything. Moreover, any thwarting of the relentless Will-to-Live causes us pain. Our existence consequently ticktocks between suffering and boredom.
In such a world of chance and contingency, earthly happiness is impossible, existing only in the future, which is uncertain, or in the past, which is irrecoverable. The present is always “inadequate.” Logically speaking, then, “nothing whatever is worth our exertions, our efforts, and our struggles” for “all good things are empty and fleeting.”
In short, human beings dwell, as the Buddhists say, in the realm of samsara, bound to a repeated cycle of desire and suffering. Even nature is “the battleground of tormented and agonized beings who continue to exist only by each devouring the other. Therefore, every beast of prey in it is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of torturing deaths.” Ours is, in fact, the worst of all possible worlds, both valueless and unreal.
And yet, because of the inexorable Will-to-Live, we fear death far more than we dread the endless miseries and privations of life. Still, asks Schopenhauer, why should we be afraid of nonexistence since no one is troubled about having been nothing before his or her birth? After our “momentary intermezzo” on Earth, we will soon enjoy again “the lost paradise of non-existence.” In a haunting analogy, he writes that everyone “ultimately reaches port with masts and rigging gone,” when “it is immaterial whether they were happy or unhappy in a life which consisted merely of a fleeting vanishing present and is now over and finished.” How foolish then is it “to regret and deplore the fact that in the past we let slip the opportunity for some pleasure or good fortune! For what more would we have now? Just the shrivelled-up mummy of a memory.” By its very nature, concludes the philosopher, life is a disappointment and a cheat.
Can nothing be done, then, for poor, forked humanity? There are some palliatives. Compassion, above all. We should be kind to one another and to all our fellow creatures, including the beasts. Art — especially music — can provide a temporary respite from the burden of time. Philosophical knowledge can grant us serenity and insight, while asceticism and the renunciation of desire may free us from bondage to the Will and lead us to a peaceful Nirvana.
Despite all his gloomy reasoning, Schopenhauer himself led a highly civilized and orderly bachelor existence, enjoying concerts, art galleries, the Times of London, and casual love affairs. He died — in 1860 at age 72 — while sitting quietly on his couch. During the second half of the 19th century, he was arguably the best known modern philosopher since Hegel, whom he despised. Today, though, he is mostly read as an influence on Nietzsche or raided for his numerous pithy observations about almost everything. Here’s one that neatly characterizes many of the so-called “patriots” of the Capitol-swarming mob:
“Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”
As presented in On the Suffering of the World, Schopenhauer’s cheerless metaphysics often comes across as convincing in the abstract — until we compare his fatalistic and quietist views against our actual experience of life’s rich tapestry. Still, even if Schopenhauer is essentially right about the human condition, shouldn’t we try to live as if he weren’t?
— Michael Dirda/The