Today, we're talking about Arthur Schopenhauer, who
is perhaps philosophy's most famous pessimist.
Schopenhauer is in a sense the opposite of Hegel because,
whereas Hegel is confident that reason rules the world
and human freedom is ever increasing, schopenhauer
says: basically, life is horrible and nothing has
any reason to it at all.
Schopenhauer is not a teleological thinker.
So he doesn't believe in an end goal and he doesn't
believe in progress.
For him, the world is not a rational place.
If anything, it's a huge source of pain and suffering,
and most philosophers have tended to ignore that
and just sort of focus on the positive while being
completely delusional about the nature of human existence.
Schopenhauer says that life is suffering.
Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by both Buddhist
and Hindu philosophy, where there's a sort of
illusory way that we engage with the world, right?
Things appear to have a particular order, but
behind them, things are actually quite different.
This is known in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy as Maya,
which is a veil of illusion.
Schopenhauer thinks that we live sort of.
Front of this veil and it gives us the illusion that
things are rational and following a particular order.
But in fact, once we rip this veil away, we see
that everything is chaos.
Let's think a little bit more about Schopenhauer's idea
that life is suffering, or, as he calls it on page 1,
that misfortune is the rule.
Schopenhauer says that we have an infinite susceptibility
to pain, but a finite susceptibility to pleasure.
So my feelings of pleasure, for Schopenhauer, max out.
I can only feel a certain amount of pleasure
and then no more.
But no matter how painful things are, things
can always get worse.
Things can always be more painful.
So on average, human pain outweighs human pleasure.
He also says that life is a uselessly disturbing episode,
a kind of blip in nothingness.
It's a disappointment.
Life is a condition of distress.
So cheery.
Now you can already see why he has a reputation
for being a pessimist.
Did I mention that the world is also a hell
and a penal colony?
what does it mean to say that our susceptibility
to pain is infinite, but our susceptibility
to pleasure is finite?
Well, Schopenhauer conceives pleasure
essentially negatively.
Pleasure is how things are when they're just
sort of going along without any disturbance.
Pain occurs when our will runs up against an obstacle.
So you might think about the fact that when you're
healthy, you don't notice your health, right?
You're walking comfortably.
But when you're unhealthy, then that's when you
start to notice your body.
If you have a blister, suddenly walking
becomes laborious and you focus on that.
So we feel pain, but we don't feel painlessness.
Well-being is the mere elimination of pain.
The three blessings of life-- health, youth, and freedom--
we only become aware of once we have lost them.
Happiness for Schopenhauer is to be measured by the
absence of suffering.
And in this sense, you might think about humans as the
least happy of creatures.
Schopenhauer thinks that non-human animals are
happier than humans are because they suffer less.
Animals are the embodiment of the present.
So what we appreciate about our pets, for instance,
is the fact that they seem to be blissfully unaware
of their impending death.
They seem to live in the present moment and
to enjoy things, not to worry about the future
or to dwell on the past.
You can see here that our memory and our anticipation
of the future contribute to our suffering.
We have the ability to reflect, and reflection
disturbs tranquility.
Non-human animals also, according to Schopenhauer,
don't care about the opinions of others.
Humans get so caught up in obsessing about what others
think about us, whether we're achieving our ambitions or
goals, and that contributes to our suffering as well.
In addition, animals don't seem to get bored.
Humans are often bored.
He says that want (or desire) and boredom are the
two poles of human life.
And we're always oscillating back and forth between them.
But this also means that animals--in lacking
anxiety, in lacking care, in lacking future
orientation--also lack hope.
They're satisfied with their current existence in
a way that humans are not.
They just don't have any need for something like
hope because things are good in the present.
Schopenhauer says that we live in the worst of all possible
worlds, which is a play on the philosopher Leibniz's
theory that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
For Schopenhauer, the world is so bad that if it got
any worse, it simply could not continue to exist.
That comes up on page 35.
He also notes that we're happiest when falling asleep
and unhappiest when waking up, suggesting that a lack
of consciousness is actually the best state for humans.
And this leads to an important upshot of
Schopenhauer's position, which is sometimes known as
the position of antinatalism.
The idea that birth is a harm.
Schopenhauer says, because we are happiest when we
perceive our existence the least, when we reflect the
least, it would actually be better not to exist at all.
Schopenhauer also thinks that humans ourselves are the worst
source of our own suffering, whether individually, through
the fact that we tend to fixate on the past and
project happiness in the future, or collectively.So he
mentions slavery here, right?
Slavery is a human creation and it causes
all manner of suffering.
And so humans are the worst to ourselves, to our own people.
Let me say something about Schopenhauer's term will
because the section that we're reading comes from
his book, The World as Will and Representation.
For Schopenhauer, the will is a sort of mindless or
blind impulse, which he describes as the will to live.
It's the chaos behind the veil of illusion,
which is representation.
Once we pull the veil away, we see this inchoate kind
of force willing itself.
He says on page 17 that the will wills itself
absolutely and eternally.
So it's not even simply self-preservation
because self-preservation implies myself relative
to a different being.
The very ability to distinguish myself from
a different being is already part of the veil of
illusion or representation.
Actually, nothing is separate from anything else.
Ultimately, this also resonates with Schopenhauer's
use of Buddhist and Hindu philosophies.
For Schopenhauer, the will is manifested through
the impulse to the sexual act of procreation,
but more generally, the will is the principle of
the world's existence.
It is what he calls ontologically
undifferentiated.
The will itself doesn't recognize any
separation among beings.
For Schopenhauer, the will becomes reflective in humans.
And humans then get to decide whether we want to
affirm the will or to denyit.
To affirm the natural chaos behind the representation
of reality that we find comforting, or to reject
it and to seek comfort in order, reason, et cetera.
Like for instance, Hegel, according to
Schopenhauer, since he has vehemently anti-Hegelian.
Schopenhauer thinks that people like Hegel, in trying
to create a systematic conception of how things
really are, is delusional, is denying the scary, terrifying,
chaotic nature of existence.
I look forward to talking to you about
this on Slack and Zoom.