Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes - Volume 4 E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 466

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

"Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes Volume 4" comprises the five Books "Schopenhauer in 60 Minutes", "Nietzsche in 60 Minutes", "Wittgenstein in 60 Minutes", "Kafka in 60 Minutes", and "Arendt in 60 Minutes". Each short study sums up the key idea at the heart of each respective thinker and asks the question: "Of what use is this key idea to us today?" But above all the philosophers get to speak for themselves. Their most important statements are prominently presented, as direct quotations, in speech balloons with appropriate graphics, with exact indication of the source of each quote in the author's works. This light-hearted but nonetheless scholarly precise rendering of the ideas of each thinker makes it easy for the reader to acquaint him- or herself with the great questions of our lives. Because every philosopher who has achieved global fame has posed the "question of meaning": what is it that holds, at the most essential level, the world together? For Schopenhauer it is the "blind will" that drives on every entity in the world. For Nietzsche it is "will to power" that urges human beings to a radical individual realization of the self. Wittgenstein, for his part, sees in language and our day-to-day "language games" the central element that marks our existence and society as a whole. Kafka, by contrast, discovered a very secret and fragile dimension of our lives: the dimension of inter-human relations and this relation's dark side. Arendt, finally, provides us, with her thesis of "the banality of evil", a marvellous insight into the morality - and amorality - of entire societies. In other words, the meaning of the world and thus of our own lives remains, among philosophers, a topic of great controversy. One thing, though, is sure: each of these five thinkers struck, from his own perspective, one brilliant spark out of that complex crystal that is the truth.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Great Thinkers

in 60 Minutes

Schopenhauer in 60 Minutes

Nietzsche in 60 Minutes

Wittgenstein in 60 Minutes

Kafka in 60 Minutes

Arendt in 60 Minutes

Walther Ziegler

Schopenhauer

in 60 Minutes

Translated by Alexander Reynolds

Contents

Schopenhauer’s Great Discovery

Schopenhauer’s Central Idea

The World is Only My Representation

The Real World as Blind Will

The Sixfold Suffering Caused by the Blind Will-to-Live

The Blind Will-to-Live in History

The Blind Will-to-Live and God

Compassion as the Basis of Ethics

The Triple Overcoming of the Will in Art, Theatre and Ascetic Practice

Of What Use Is Schopenhauer’s Discovery for Us Today?

Can We Escape the Blind Will Through Asceticism?

“Think Positive” as Ideological Deceit: Schopenhauer’s Plea for Pessimism

.

Whoever Does Not Know His Age Will Surely Know That Age’s Sufferings – Growing Old Realistically With Schopenhauer

Freeing Oneself from the Compulsion to Be Happy – Schopenhauer’s Legacy

Bibliographical References

Schopenhauer’s Great Discovery

Of all the philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) has the reputation of being by far the greatest and most brilliant pessimist. And indeed he did succeed, like no one before him or since, in recognizing, and in describing in gripping, moving language, all the shortcomings, both great and small, of our existences here on earth.

Life on our planet, Schopenhauer argued, has been, since time immemorial, falsely interpreted and portrayed in far too flattering a light. Both philosophers and scientists have assumed, entirely falsely, that Man is homo sapiens: a being guided by mind, an animal rationale. But this, Schopenhauer goes on, is a great error. Because the fact is that we human beings are not at all guided by reason in the way we live our lives. Rather, we tend to act solely under the impulsion of our deep-lying animal drives:

We seriously overestimate our own capacities, Schopenhauer insists, already by believing that we can know the world by use of our reason, let alone use reason to guide and direct it. In the first place, he says, we never know the world as it actually is; we only know the idea that we form of it:

But there is also a second reason and herein lies Schopenhauer’s great discovery. Behind all the ideas of the world that we form for ourselves lies a deeper moving principle upon which we never reflect, a kind of primal force inherent in all plants, animals and human beings. This is what Schopenhauer calls “the blind will” or, as he also describes it, “the will-to-live”:

This is the reason why Schopenhauer gave to the great work that was to make him famous the title The World as Will and Representation, consciously and deliberately giving pride of place to the notion “will”. Because, as he himself says, the core idea of his philosophy can be summed up in a single sentence. Human beings may form for themselves a great mass of different ideas of the world; but in reality the whole world is just the expression of an irrepressible will-to-live which has manifested itself, since the beginning of time, in inanimate matter, in plants, in animals and also in human beings:

The will-to-live is, as Schopenhauer emphasizes here, a “universal craving”, that is to say, it is active everywhere and at all times. It is this will-to-live that prompts plants to turn toward the sun and impels animals and human beings to eat, drink and procreate. It operates in the form of the sexual impulse and all other vital impulses, manifesting itself million-fold, at every moment, in every organism on earth.

How deeply this will-to-live permeates our inmost nature can be judged by how frantically any being will resist if the attempt is made to take his life away from him. Regardless of whether the universal will-to-live is manifested, in any given case, in a wasp, a mouse or a human being, the creature permeated and animated by it will in every case struggle, with the same limitless intensity, against death:

This phenomenon, that all organisms wish at any cost to remain alive and that they exert all their power and strength to do so, is, for Schopenhauer, an initial proof of the truth of his key idea. But evolution as a whole as well, with its enormous range of different substances, plants and animals, its constant adaptation to new environmental conditions, its protracted, passionate struggle for the persistence of certain species, seems to Schopenhauer to be a sure indication of the universal operation of the so-called “blind will” to live:

The will, then, is the only “unchangeable keynote” of our being. The notion, cherished for thousands of years by both theologians and philosophers, that it is Reason, be it human or divine, that is the really determining moment behind all living things is, Schopenhauer insists, in the end a completely untenable notion:

But why does Schopenhauer speak of a blind will? Does this will-to-live not have a goal and a purpose: namely, as he himself admits, the preservation of the species?

Looked at closely, then, the will-to-live is a “blind urge without motive” because, in the end, it pursues no recognizable or even meaningful goal:

The will-to-live, then, is a “fool”, a wish that is merely delusional. It serves no higher purpose. All the eating and being-eaten in the animal kingdom, and all the activities of human societies, are really just a blind commotion. This reaches its peak in procreation through the act of sexual intercourse:

The “intensity of the urge” here leads inevitably to an uncontrolled increase in population, to terrible wars, and eventually to

But the will-to-live is blind above all because, generally speaking, it cannot know or reflect upon itself. This lack of self-knowledge comes to expression when it enters into the different individuals who make up the human race and manifests itself with an equal intensity at the same time in every one of these mutually contending individuals. Schopenhauer explicitly states that the will-to-live “individuates itself” but neither becomes, through this individuation, less intense nor really has to divide itself up. It continues to operate in each individual with the same absolute, indivisible energy. It is just herein that it shows its unreflecting “foolishness”. Because one and the same will-to-live that drives on the hungry wolf to hunt and kill the deer drives on, at the same time, the deer to try to escape the jaws of the wolf. This means that the will

In other words

The “blind” will neither notices that it is, in this way, brutally cannibalizing itself nor would it care if it did so notice. It is a force without morality, self-reflection, or self-control.

Not even the much-vaunted sovereign, majestic placidity and beauty of the lion should delude us as to the fact that he too owes his existence to this blind, brutal urge alone and stands, as it were, atop a mountain of corpses, by whose blood he has bought this existence, which will last only until he himself falls victim to this cannibalistic will. The same stubborn will, indeed, as inheres in the lion inheres also in the humble weeds that, once torn out, immediately begin to grow back again:

The will, then, is that kernel of all reality which is not susceptible of any further explanation. It is also, as Schopenhauer also describes it, “metaphysical”. What does this mean? The word “metaphysical” is formed from two Ancient Greek words meta and physis. To say that the will is “metaphysical” signifies that it extends back behind, or alternatively that it extends beyond, all that is merely physical. What this signifies, then, is that the will-to-live is not a drive that can be perceived by the physical senses, nor any natural phenomenon or natural law that can be measured using the tools of science. Rather, it is that force which underlies all measurements and scientific determinations and which alone makes them possible. Because in contrast to its individual manifestations, running from the amoeba through the dinosaurs right up to all the individual forms of existence today, the will-to-live is an eternal force which remains always absolutely constant and which forms the background and basis for everything:

Thus far, then, Schopenhauer’s key philosophical idea is easy to grasp and follow. We must all surely agree, he argues, that we ourselves and all the organisms that we find around us wish to go on living. In other words, it must be conceded, firstly, that there is such a thing as a “will-to-live” and, secondly, that just such a will needs to cannibalize itself if it is to persist in its existence. In this way, the will in question inevitably causes pain and suffering:

This mutual inflicting of pain does not apply to the animal kingdom alone. Human beings too, Schopenhauer points out, have, since the beginning of time, enslaved, exploited, martyred and murdered one another. In this regard, indeed, we are considerably worse than animals, inasmuch as we use our reason to pursue such activities and oppress, for example, all other species, turning them into factory products. The basic pattern of behaviour for human beings is egoism, which makes it inevitable that we become entangled in a “war of all against all”:

Over and over again Schopenhauer draws for us, as no other philosopher before or since has done, a deeply sombre portrait of human existence and of the path that we are all bound to follow, from our conception by our parents in the sensually pleasurable act of sexual intercourse down to a miserable sickening and death in our old age:

Schopenhauer answers this last question with a resounding “yes”. Life, in the last analysis, is a mistake, a kind of accident of evolution, something deeply unpleasant that the universe has unreasonably imposed upon us. Because this blind will that is the driving force behind all that occurs on our planet serves only to cause lifelong suffering to every living being:

It would have been better, then, Schopenhauer believes, if no form of life had ever arisen on the earth at all. Because, as Schopenhauer declares in summary of his whole philosophical position, we must surely all of us recognize

This radical conclusion that it would be better not to live, indeed best to have never been born at all, earned Schopenhauer the reputation of being the greatest pessimist and misanthrope of all time. And indeed Schopenhauer did tend to avoid, in his daily life, large parties and gatherings. He remained a lifelong bachelor, living in rented accommodation and pursuing the solitary profession of “private scholar”. Only for a very brief period did he try to assume a more public role as an intellectual, taking on the job of lecturer at the recently-founded University of Berlin. Deliberately and provocatively, however, he insisted that his lectures be scheduled at exactly the same hour on the same day as the lectures of the far more famous Hegel. When, understandably, almost no students chose him over the renowned teacher known at the time as the “philosophical dictator of Germany”, he forswore, in disgust, all further participation in university life.

Thanks to a small inheritance from his father, who had died at an early age, Schopenhauer was able to lead a simple but independent life without having, as he put it, to “twist, turn, accommodate and renounce his convictions”23 in the way that philosophy professors dependent on the university for their salary were forced to do.

Throughout most of his life, then, Schopenhauer barely left his sparsely-furnished two-room apartment except to eat in a restaurant or take his dog “Atma” for lengthy walks. He called this beloved pet “Atma” in reference to the Vedantic philosophical name for “the World-Soul”.24 But when “Atma”’s behaviour annoyed him, he called him “Man”!

One other very characteristic scene from Schopenhauer’s life, often foregrounded by his biographers, concerned the common space that he had, due to the very modest circumstances in which he lived, to share with his neighbour, a certain seamstress in her forties by the name of Caroline Marquet. On one occasion this woman was conversing so loudly and persistently with some female friends in close proximity to Schopenhauer’s study that, failing to persuade her to desist, the philosopher cursed her and pushed her out into the stairwell area where, according to her own account, she fell down and injured her arm, resulting in a persisting nervous trembling of this limb. She brought criminal charges against Schopenhauer and the philosopher was sentenced by a court to pay out to Miss Marquet “compensation for personal suffering” in the amount of 60 talers annually, to continue until this trembling ceased. Schopenhauer could not help retorting to the judge who imposed this penalty that Miss Marquet would surely be clever enough to ensure that the “trembling of the arm” in question went on all her life. Time proved him right. The notoriously tight-fisted Schopenhauer ended up paying this “compensation for personal suffering” to Miss Marquet for no less than twenty-seven years. When he finally received in the post notification of the old woman’s death and a copy of her death certificate, he scribbled on this latter:

Such anecdotes, as well as the inarguably radically pessimistic nature of his philosophy, have given rise to a picture of Schopenhauer as a cantankerous hermit who most likely developed only in the course of a long life this ever deeper mistrust toward his fellow human beings. But this picture is misleading. Astonishingly, Schopenhauer arrived already as a young man at this deeply sceptical view of the world and of Man:

Already as a young man of twenty-three he had said to the old German poet Wieland:

He had completed, indeed, his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation, already before he was thirty years old, an achievement almost unique in the history of philosophy. His pessimistic assessment of life and the world was, then, clearly something that arose very early in his experience. When, at the age of 16, he visited the French harbour city of Toulon with his parents, certain old galleys were still being used as prisons, with the prisoners chained to benches like the galley-slaves of ancient times. Schopenhauer was deeply impressed with the persistent will-to-live of men in such awful positions:

Of still greater significance for his philosophy than such experiences, however, was, we may imagine, Schopenhauer’s difficult relationship with his mother. Johanna Schopenhauer was a successful novelist in these very early years of the 19th century and after the early death of her husband, which may have been a case either of accident or of suicide, she moved with her son to the great cultural centre of Weimar. The “salon” that she created there was frequented by such luminaries of the German intellectual life of the time as Wieland, the Schlegel brothers and even the great Goethe himself. Johanna was a believer in “free love” and led a very lively sex-life for the time.

Schopenhauer often criticized his mother on this account. But the real quarrels between them were not due to this but rather due to the deeply pessimistic opinions with which the young Arthur had the habit of driving away the guests of his mother’s “salon”. We find his mother writing to him on one occasion: “You are not without intellect and education […] but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable and I consider it most difficult to live with you […] because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others. With this, you embitter the people around you […]”29 In the end, Johanna Schopenhauer disinherited her son, cutting off contact with him entirely.

Whether, and to what extent, this difficult relationship affected the young Schopenhauer also in his philosophical meditations must, in the end, remain a matter of speculation. What is certain is that he saw, from very early on, human life from an incorruptibly dark and sober perspective. His core philosophical notion was clear and simple. We are constantly impelled through our existence by the will-to-live and this will, by creating needs, thereby also creates suffering. Much like the Buddhists whose work he was one of the first in Europe to closely study, Schopenhauer concludes: “To live is to suffer”:

But Schopenhauer does not leave things here. He would not, indeed, have been a philosopher if he had not drawn certain specific conclusions from this recognition of the terrible facts. We must first, he argued, accept the world and our own inner nature for what they are: namely, blind will. But this acceptance alone produces a first small improvement in our situation. If we recognize and accept for what it is the blind impelled-ness that makes up most of what we call human life, we can take a calmer and more patient attitude to all the things that might otherwise seem infuriating and provocative. Having accepted this, we begin intuitively to sense and to understand that other human beings too are similarly impelled, and victims of one and the same blind will-to-live as ourselves. This means that we can begin also to identify with their situation and with their suffering. This capacity for identification with others, which is commonly known as “pity”, can, when translated into the active giving of help, and selfless action for others’ sake, even liberate us, even if only for short periods, from the egoism otherwise imposed on us by the blind urge to live and flourish.

We can even, Schopenhauer continues, take yet another step beyond this. We can say “no” to life. By “saying ‘no’ to life” he does not mean committing suicide but rather only performing a negation of the “blind will”. We can, Schopenhauer believes, succeed in refusing our basic state of “impelled-ness” through such means as art, ascetic exercises, or meditation:

But what does this mean, concretely? How is it possible for me to say “no” to life? What does it mean to live “ascetically”? If our life is nothing other than a realization of blind will, a senseless eating and being-eaten, how is it possible to escape from this cycle at all? Can we really be freed from it simply by ascetic exercises? And also: of what use to us is Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the present day? Do we not rather find recommended to us today, by everyone and everywhere, optimism and “positive thinking”? Schopenhauer provides us with fascinating, uncompromising answers to all these questions.

Schopenhauer’s Central Idea

The World is Only My Representation

Schopenhauer’s main work and masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation, begins with a very short, simple sentence:

But already this apparently simple statement of fact contains a provocation. If the whole world is only “my representation”, this means that I may well not be seeing the world as it is at all but rather only as I imagine it to be. But this is indeed what Schopenhauer is claiming by advancing this proposition. All the things that we take to be real and objective we owe in fact only to our ideas or images of these things:

In the first instance, then, the world consists only of the ideas or representations that we have of it. Thus, the lumberjack whose job it is to cut down a tall tree will certainly have a different “representation” of this tree in his mind than will the children who like to climb on it, or than the courting couple who come there in the evening to kiss and cuddle under its boughs. One and the same tree, one and the same world, are perceived in very different ways:

This is the reason why we often find ourselves “talking past one another” and saying to one another things like “what strange ideas you have” or “my goodness, what kind of a world do you think you’re living in?” Schopenhauer draws a very serious conclusion from such apparently trivial turns of phrase:

But how is our consciousness made? How exactly does it function? Schopenhauer relies, in his philosophy of knowledge and perception, very strongly on Immanuel Kant, for whose writings he had an enormous admiration. Already several decades before Schopenhauer Kant had proven that we human beings perceive and know the world only through not just one but two types of “filter”: firstly, through our necessary sorting of all that we perceive into the forms of time and space; and secondly through the further organization of these perceptions in terms of the “categories of thought”. Our minds are so made, Kant argued, that we are compelled first to order everything that we encounter in terms of its place in the sequence of time and its position vis-à-vis other things in the order of space and then to further order these things located in time and space in terms of logical inter-relations, such as one being the cause of, or caused by, another. In other words, whether we wish to or not, we are simply made in such a way that the world must present itself to us as composed of things that “exist now”, “will exist later”, or that “happened before” or “happened long ago”. We are also made in such a way that all that we encounter must present itself to us as “next to”, “behind”, or “above” other things and so on. And finally, our minds are so made that whatever enters our field of knowledge must do so in a form that concords with certain logical dimensions or classes. Any known tree, for example, will have to fall into such categories as “wooden”, “big”, “heavy”, “green”, or “about to fall over” and furthermore into such logical relations as “about to fall over because the lumberjack has cut deeply into its trunk with his axe.” Kant also strongly emphasized, however, that, given these “filters” placed before all our knowledge, it is impossible for us to know anything about how the world might look if these filters were not there. The “thing in itself”, the “tree in itself”, the “world in itself” remain secrets for us. All we can know of them is that there must be “something” there for our minds to “filter”.

But it is just at this point that Schopenhauer goes beyond, and contradicts, his admired philosophical master Kant:

Man has, Schopenhauer insists, not only a representation of the world around him but also of himself and his living body. And it is just this living body that necessarily alerts us to the fact that there does exist, behind all our conscious representations of the world, something specific and knowable: namely, that universal will that is the will-to-live. Contrary, then, to what Kant believed, we can acquire knowledge even of the inmost essence of the world and of the things that make it up. Our living body unlocks for us what Kant considers to be the impenetrable “secret” that is the “world in itself”. This is the case inasmuch as, in contrast to the way in which we represent to ourselves everything else in the world, we have, of our own bodies, a double representation or experience:

In other words, we perceive our own body, and represent it to ourselves, in the first place just as we would perceive and represent to ourselves a wardrobe or a chair: i.e. as an object of a specific height and weight. Above and beyond this, however, we also perceive and experience our bodily existence in a much more intense and direct way that has nothing to do with the way we experience the wardrobe or the chair. We experience ourselves through our bodies as beings impelled by drives and urges, such as hunger, thirst, sexual desire and needs of many other kinds. In other words, we experience ourselves through our bodies as beings consisting of will:

Once we have discovered in this way, in a first step, the will within ourselves in the form of an individual certainty of its presence, we can then go on, in a second step, to discover the reality and operation of this will in the entirety of external Nature:

By transferring, then, our direct certainty of our own existence as will onto other human beings, animals and, in the end, onto the whole of Nature, we recognize will-to-live to be the force that pervades and constitutes the universe as a whole:

The Real World as Blind Will

For Schopenhauer, then, there lies behind all the phenomena that make up the world and even, interestingly, behind the forces and motions involved in the non-organic part of Nature, a single universal, indivisible, eternal Will. Every human being, he argues, should be able to come in the end to recognize

The world, indeed, may initially appear, due to the many different representations that we form of it, to be an extremely variegated thing that is, moreover, entirely alien in its nature to us who live in it. Where we examine it closely, however, we find it indeed to consist always and only of that very same underlying urge or drive as we feel, directly and immediately, operating in our own selves. This urge or drive, Schopenhauer argues, can be discovered to be at work already in the physical processes occurring in the inanimate, inorganic parts of Nature (i.e. minerals, atmospheric forces etc). One step up the scale to sentience, in the plant world, the operation of this drive is even clearer. Once one directs one’s attention to the world of sentient animal life, however, it is completely unmistakable:

We human beings may, indeed, walk upright and thus present a different outward form from the other animals, and there may also exist significant character differences between one member of the human race and another. But the same clock is ticking within us all. Considered from Schopenhauer’s viewpoint, we are just puppets in a giant world-theatre. Our strings are pulled, however, not by some agent external to us, such as God or some God-like cosmic puppet-master, but we are rather set and kept in motion by this “clockwork” internal to us all:

One and the same clockwork of the will-to-live ticks on in the human being, the magnet, the plant and the whole variety of animals:

In the course of the many millennia of Man’s evolution this will has given external form, in the various human organs, to its inner nature and the aspects of its blind drive:

But there is, in Schopenhauer’s view, after all one unique quality, or at least one gradual difference from other beings, which tends to set Man off, from a certain point in his development onward, from all other component elements of Nature. This is the emergence in Man, very late in the history of the planet, of the capacity for self-awareness, or self-consciousness. Because, in distinction from the phenomena of the physical world, from plants and even from other animals, Man is able to recognize and think about the “clockwork” that is driving him on, even as it continues to do so:

But this self-consciousness that the will attains in Man, and this clear recognition that we are all being driven on by a blind instinctive force, is not something that frees us from this force or radically alters the lives of us human beings. The “clockwork” does indeed continue to drive us on even as we come to know and recognize it. Even despite this achieved self-awareness, we must continue to do much as the un-self-aware animals do: eat, drink and follow the restless urge to procreate. Because consciousness, in the end, is no liberator but rather only a servant: a kind of tool that is used by the will in order to more skilfully satisfy its drives and urges:

Our consciousness, then, or in other words our capacity for reason and understanding, is merely something secondary. The will has created this capacity for thought and reasoning the better to achieve its own irrational ends. For this reason Schopenhauer describes our power of reason as something that is employed by the will just as the blacksmith employs a hammer, i.e. as a useful tool. Thus, our reason and understanding come into play above all once the lower drives have awakened and fixated on something they desire:

Intellect, then, is something ancillary that was not to be found anywhere in Nature until the will found it had an interest in creating it:

This “expedient” of intellect served, indeed, in many minor and less minor practical matters, to aid Man in achieving his ends and aims. He could now go about his hunting more cleverly and calculatingly, setting traps, for example, for the animals he wanted to kill. He could also build houses and bridges. But, considered in the larger and longer term, the birth of intellect was also a burden on human existence because now, suddenly, Man was able to form a conception of his own death:

That consciousness which is created by the blind will as its instrument signifies in the end, then, no liberation but rather comes to burden human existence not just in one but in two senses. Firstly, it brings Man face to face with the fact that everyone who is born must eventually die; secondly, this awareness of inevitable death tends to overshadow and put into question the value of everything that a human being can do in the short space of time accorded to him.

The Sixfold Suffering Caused by the Blind Will-to-Live

In fact, the blind will-to-live condemns human beings not just to these two forms of suffering, death and the sense of meaninglessness caused by knowing one will die, but to what might be itemised as six forms of suffering in total. Firstly we suffer through our own basic bodily needs. Hunger, thirst and sexual desires are experienced by us, Schopenhauer argues, as “lacks”. When we are thirsty, for example, this is a suffering that signals to us that the body lacks liquids:

But even if we could, for the space of a moment, have all our wishes and needs fulfilled, we suffer secondly from the constant recurrence of these needs. Every meal, every act of sexual intercourse, affords us only a brief “pause to catch our breath”, a satisfaction lasting just an hour or a day at most, before the same needs and drives make themselves felt once again:

The blind will-to-live, then, condemns us to a constant longing, a constant restlessness and disquiet:

This image of “the sieve of the Danaids” is one which Schopenhauer drew from classical mythology. According to the ancient myth, the fifty daughters of King Danaus all murdered their husbands on their wedding nights and were condemned, therefore, by Zeus to spending eternity in Hades carrying water to a pot not in buckets but in sieves, so that, each time they reached their goal, they no longer had any water in their receptacle and had to go back and begin all over again. The blind will, suggests Schopenhauer, is like this “sieve of the Danaids”, because it demands constantly to be “filled” with some form of satisfaction but is always “empty” again, and demanding to be “filled” once more, within moments of “satisfaction”’s being accorded it.

Here, indeed, one might raise an objection and ask: “Is it not rather a good thing that hunger, thirst and sexual desire recur again and again? Does this not ensure that human beings likewise again and again experience the pleasure of satisfying these needs and desires?” But Schopenhauer repudiates this objection extremely vehemently:

Thirdly, we suffer from the fact of the blind will-to-live’s having “individuated itself” into the great plurality of individual living beings. Because, having been “individuated” in this way, these many separate organisms necessarily end up becoming involved in a constant existential struggle with one another, a “war of all against all”:

“

This, the will’s fighting for “matter, space and time” goes on constantly between the millions of plants, animals and human beings into which it has “individuated itself”. Plants which grow up too closely together “fight for space” in the sense that one tends to block the sunlight from another, until the latter withers and dies. Animals, in their turn, consume plants, and also other animals, in order to maintain themselves. But the most brutal fight of all is conducted by Man, who has subjugated the whole of Nature and turned much of it into a kind of factory commodity. Man raises plants and vegetables in such artificial constructions as greenhouses and shuts up living animals in pens and stalls:

Schopenhauer alludes here to the famous saying of the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes: “Man is a wolf to Man”. Because, in Schopenhauer’s observation as in Hobbes’s, human beings had been involved, throughout the whole of history, as nations and collectives in struggles for fertile land and territory but also as individuals with one another for their private gains and advantages. Schopenhauer could look back, for evidence of this, to all the wars of the past and also to such recently-abolished practices as slavery; but he saw sufficient evidence, indeed, in the social realities of his own day, such as the mass exploitation of Man by Man in the factories of 19th-century Europe, where men, women and even children were obliged to “perform the same mechanical work” for ten, twelve or fourteen hours a day for almost no money:

Since all living beings are dependent on the basic metabolic processes, such as breathing, eating and drinking, and need constantly to be appropriating whatever is needed for these processes to continue, there is simply no way out of that mutual cannibalism that is the basic structure of our universe. Everything devours everything else:

Schopenhauer provides us with a whole series of striking and gruesome examples of how this “hungry will” manifests itself on our planet. He describes, for example, certain kinds of spider in whom the female of the species devours the male after this latter has fertilized her eggs; or insects that project their eggs into members of other insect species, so that the emerging larvae eat their way out of their hosts in order to be born. He also writes of giant turtles which, coming up onto land from the sea to lay their eggs,

But perhaps the most impressive example of the “self-individuation” of the blind and “hungry” will, and of the cruel struggle that it gives rise to, is given by Schopenhauer in the form of his description of the bulldog-ant:

Schopenhauer cites, in fact, a large number of natural phenomena and events which seem to bear witness to the fact that the will-to-live, once it has “individuated” itself into some singular form or figure of life, begins immediately to assert itself in this form of life in the most blind and ruthless way. Indeed, in the just-cited case of the ant cut in two, the will-to-live continues to stage its egotistical struggle even between two halves of a being which had formerly been just one. We observe, it is true, in both human and animal communities certain forms of essentially social behaviour, such as the collective parenting behaviour known as “brood care”.

The fourth major dimension of suffering to which the will-to-live condemns human beings is worry and anxiety about the future. This suffering is indeed peculiar to human beings, since neither plants nor even animals know such things as fear of hardship in old age or worry about other threats which might emerge only in the future:

If an animal has had its fill of eating and drinking, it will simply sit there radiating peace and contentment. A human being, on the other hand, will, even with a full belly, be worrying about where tomorrow’s meal is coming from. A human being will tend also always to have one principal care or worry that weighs on him quite especially, be it an unfulfilled wish or an anxiety regarding poverty or sickness:

And even if the matter that is causing care and anxiety in this new case is, when considered soberly and objectively, much more trivial than the care one has just been relieved of

This fact, then, that Man always worries about the future and that every source of care and worry, even when “dethroned” by a solution, will always see some other immediately “take its throne” is the fourth major form of suffering for human beings in this world. The fifth major dimension of suffering, however, is, remarkably, one which tends to arise precisely at times when a person is not beset by any care or worry. The head of a family may, for example, have arrived in a position of such wealth and power that he can see to all the needs and wishes of himself, his wife and all his children for all the foreseeable future. Just at this point, however, he is likely to be afflicted by a new form of suffering: namely, boredom. The danger in boredom consists in the fact that one’s energies are no longer occupied. Existence no longer has any concrete goal set for it and is driven back upon itself. Where there had previously been an agitated round of problems to deal with and solve, there now arises an uncanny rest and stillness. Time seems no longer to be passing at all.

Human existence here makes the painful discovery that the only “meaning of life” consists in the strenuous, wearisome maintaining of life itself and that, once this strain is removed, it has no “meaning” at all:

Schopenhauer’s observation here regarding “the more intelligent animals” is quite correct. It does indeed often occur that animals kept in a zoo, who no longer have to see to their own day-to-day survival, become neurotic or apathetic. For similar reasons, human beings often fear the day on which they will reach an age where they no longer have to go to work every day. Some, indeed, begin to feel this panic in the face of “free time” long before the age of retirement and try to make sure, by filling their daily schedules with every sort of social engagement above and beyond their professional ones, that they never have to feel threatened by boredom at all:

The suffering involved in this experience of “the utter barrenness and emptiness of existence” is, for Schopenhauer, yet another indication that life, just in itself, has no value and is something that is driven on just by a blind will-to-live:

There is, then, simply no way out of suffering because we are always either vainly pursuing the satisfaction of our needs or, where we do indeed succeed in satisfying them, we fall victim to the pain of boredom:

Not even those “joys of love” so often lauded by the poets offer any real relief here. Love itself, argues Schopenhauer, is merely a promising illusion:

And the sexual impulse, in its turn, serves primarily the purpose of preserving the species. This same impulse, indeed, drives men to marry. But the women they marry, claims Schopenhauer, lose their sexual charms, at the very latest, after having borne one or two children, so that very soon the illusion of love evaporates:

Marriage, however, is just a small additional farce added to the great tragi-comedy of life. The sixth, and perhaps the greatest, of the sufferings that existence imposes upon us is death, and thereby the fact that

Thus, every action that we take becomes questionable. Whatever we do or succeed in achieving, we are always living, so to speak, “on credit” and this “credit”, that the time allotted to our lives surely is, is melting away day by day:

While we are children we do not feel this burden. In these very early years of our lives we sit, as it were, in front of a great stage-curtain in the theatre and wait impatiently, full of joyful anticipation, to see what will emerge into our sight and experience once it is drawn back:

Even in the early years of adulthood we are generally able to push the notion of death entirely out of our immediate consciousness:

But already in our thirty-sixth year, claims Schopenhauer, we cross the “summit” of this hill and are from then on able to perceive more and more clearly just what is waiting for us “at the foot of the other side”. In his typically highly imagistic language, Schopenhauer also compares human beings and their life-plans with ships whose crews, full of hope, set sail for the open sea in the expectation of discovering new countries and thereby acquiring power, fame and honour:

In other words, since everyone, in the end, “reaches the port” with broken masts and ripped sails, it makes no difference whether one person was “successful” and another not. Because the name of this “port”, for all of us equally, is death:

In summary, then: the blind will-to-live causes us to suffer in six distinct ways. Firstly, we are constantly desperately pursuing the satisfaction of our needs; secondly, these needs recur endlessly just the same; thirdly, we are also constantly preoccupied by the question of future needs; fourthly, the individualized will involves us inevitably in a “war of all against all”; fifthly, our lives are an endless pendulum swing between anxious care and boredom; and sixthly, death overshadows all that the will-to-live creates and sustains.

The Blind Will-to-Live in History

Just as the blind will-to-live manifests itself in each individual, so too does it manifest itself in the huge collective movements that make up world history:

There is, in the last analysis, nothing in the developments forming history that can rightly be described as “progress”. Rather, the blind will-to-live produces, all down the course of the centuries, at regularly-recurring intervals the same conflicts, the same oppressions and the same revolts against oppression:

This fact that peace between human beings is the exception rather than the rule and arises, as Schopenhauer points out, only “here and there” for brief intervals must necessarily prompt the question: “Why is this so? Are human beings not able to draw conclusions from all the suffering that they heap upon themselves, driven on by the will-to-live?” Schopenhauer does pose this question but remains, here too, pessimistic. There have indeed, he says, always been individual wise men who have been able really to learn from history. But they have exerted little influence, or none at all:

And since the “immense majority”, since time immemorial, have always done the very opposite to what the wise recommended, there can be no real progress. The egoism of human beings, and their constant fighting with one another, will always prevent that. Not even the state, which has been praised by so many political theorists as an agent of progress inasmuch as it causes individuals to cease to use violence on one another and to co-exist in peace, is, for Schopenhauer, no real guarantee of harmony:

The constant strife and struggle that has accompanied human existence from the very beginning finds its mythological expression in the Ancient Greek goddess Eris, known indeed as “the Goddess of Strife and Discord”. Eris, argues Schopenhauer, is as “immortal” as mythology makes her out to be; she can never be permanently driven away by any law or rule, however rational:

But even if Mankind were somehow to succeed at last, unexpectedly, in the course of the next few hundred years, in learning from history and putting an end to wars, not even this, argues Schopenhauer, would provide a way out of suffering:

This warning about the “terrible evil” of over-population is not just yet one more indication of the philosopher’s deep pessimism but, besides this, also one of how astonishingly prescient his analyses of the power of the “blind will-to-live” were. This threat to the life of the whole planet which he envisages in the form of over-population has today taken concrete form as global famines, great waves of migration prompted by these famines, destruction of the environment, wars for raw materials, for territory and for water supplies and other terrible events. Particularly worthy of meditation, perhaps, is Schopenhauer’s early observation that, in human history, “the majority have always done the opposite to what the few wise men recommended”.

Thus, for example, the Club of Rome warned as early as 1972, with its famous report on The Limits to Growth, that continued population growth, and the continued growth of economic activity itself, would likely lead to a general collapse of the world eco-system, and demanded, therefore, some sort of sustainable programme of global population control. But precisely the opposite course has been taken, in the last fifty years, to that recommended by these scientists. Since 1972, world population has grown from 3.8 billion to 7.3 billion and will, according to projections by the UN, most likely pass the 10 billion mark by 2050. As Schopenhauer argued, the sexual urge is such a profound and powerful objectification of the blind will-to-live that it is unlikely that any government will be able, even in future, to set effective limits to it.

Schopenhauer’s great philosophical rival, Hegel, by contrast, is famous for having portrayed human history in the very contrary terms to these: as a constant progress and development to higher and higher stages of the lives of nations and cultures, driven on and suffused by reason and moral spirit. But if this were really so, Schopenhauer retorted to his rival, there would surely be some palpable proof of it:

According to Schopenhauer, we can observe no real progress in either a political, a moral, or an ethical sense across the whole vast expanse of time between the barbaric beginnings of human civilization, with all their archaic rituals, and the present day. One might argue, for example, that the forms of politeness and etiquette are signs that we have become a more “highly developed” humanity. But Schopenhauer sees no essential difference between the most primitive jungle dances and the formalized solemnities seen at the royal courts of the most exquisitely civilized nations:

But even “the great”, in the end, stand no better chance of “getting beyond the essential wretchedness of our existence” than do the “little people”. Nor does the future promise any improvement here:

We simply turn, then, always in a circle. Our rational understanding is incapable of improving, or of influencing in any way, the history of the objectification of the blind will-to-live. Nations, cultures and human beings arise, exist for a time, and are then submerged once again. And from their ashes there emerge new nations, cultures and individuals:

The Blind Will-to-Live and God

But why does the blind will do this? Why does it take the trouble to manifest itself in the form of Man, as well as of all the other organisms, if all this is, in the end, without sense or purpose? And above all: why does the will mount, across the whole planet, this great spectacle of cannibalistic eating and being eaten in which plants, animals and human beings all take part? Schopenhauer himself asked himself this question:

No more, it appears, is possible than just this blunt registration of the fact that it is so, and not otherwise, that the will takes material form. Human beings, however, Schopenhauer points out, have great difficulty accepting this simple truth. They have always sought after some more beautiful explanation:

Every human being, argues Schopenhauer, feels a need for some sort of comprehensive explanation of the meaning of the world:

It is no wonder, then, that religious explanations for the meaning of life and death began to emerge already with the first emergence of consciousness. Both the Bible and the Koran give, in the last analysis, the same comforting answer: Man does not have to die but rather lives on, provided only that he believes and keeps the faith, in the world beyond. All these religions preach basically the same thing: that an all-powerful, loving God created the world in order to test human beings and, if they passed this test, reward them with eternal life. But such explanations, Schopenhauer points out, have foundered, from the very beginning, on what is called the “theodicy” problem. They cannot explain why a Creator God who is, at the same time, loving and all-powerful would possibly have created also such things as fatal illnesses and terrible natural catastrophes. The issue in need of explanation here is called “the theodicy problem” because this latter term is a composite of the ancient Greek words theos, meaning “god”, and dike, meaning “justice” or “justification”. The problem is that of “justifying” God in the face of all the evil in the world that we must, if God is all-powerful, take to have been created or at least permitted by Him.

The last great attempt at such a “justifying of God” was undertaken by the German philosopher Leibniz in his well-known theory of “the best of all possible worlds”. God, argued Leibniz, had indeed built into the world He created such bad things as sickness, death, pain and even the possibility of moral failure; nevertheless, this was still the best of all the possible worlds He could have created. Because, were it not for sickness, Man would not appreciate health; were it not for war, he would not appreciate peace; and were it not for evil, he would not appreciate the good. Schopenhauer calls Leibniz, as the inventor of this theory, “the founder of systematic optimism”92 and rejects, naturally, Leibniz’s whole perspective here. In the face of the reality we actually live in, says Schopenhauer, to speak of “the best of all possible worlds” and of “a masterpiece of God’s creation” is the most glaring absurdity:

Schopenhauer inverts Leibniz’s famous thesis and directs it back at him. Our world, he argues, is not the best of all possible worlds but, on the contrary, the worst of all possible ones:

The world, in other words, is so bad that, if it were even a tiny bit worse, it would be impossible for us to bear it and to continue to exist in it. Needless to say, Schopenhauer was a convinced atheist. He absolutely rejected the religious notion whereby all suffering in the world is either a punishment of Man by God or some form of God’s “testing” of the chosen creature “created in His image”. If this were so, Schopenhauer asked, why do dumb animals appear to have to suffer the same terrible punishments?

All “theodicy” then, Schopenhauer concludes, ultimately founders on the fact of its inability to explain the terrible suffering that exists in the world. Because a God conceived of as both loving and all-powerful cannot also be conceived of as the agent causing all this suffering. If God has indeed created all this suffering, then God must also take on and bear the responsibility for it. Of all the various religious Creation myths, then, it is the Creation myth of Hinduism that Schopenhauer finds most sensible and appealing:

The Judaeo-Christian Creation myth of the Old Testament, by contrast, seems to Schopenhauer “intolerable”:

Finally, Schopenhauer also rejects all religious Creation myths by reason of their being mere speculation. The descriptions we find in them of Heaven and of Hell look to him to be extremely “man-made”. This even applies to perhaps the most famous and most brilliant description of Hell, the first book, entitled Inferno, of Dante’s Divine Comedy, composed in the first twenty years of the 14th century. Dante here, argues Schopenhauer, certainly based his work more on human than divine models:

It is, indeed, a frequently expressed testimony of readers who get so far into Dante’s great work as the culminating Paradise that this long description of Heaven makes, particularly when set next to the striking scenes of Dante’s Hell, a rather pale and insubstantial impression, having little more to draw on than a few revered descriptions by ancient Church Fathers. Already as a very young man, Schopenhauer had noted down in his Travel Diaries:

As a convinced atheist, Schopenhauer naturally also asked himself the question: if there is no God, then what exactly does the meaning of life consist in? His answer is clear enough:

Only partially are certain suffering human beings “spectators” to the worry and trouble of certain others:

Neither God nor the Devil, nor any other sort of extra-worldly being, are looking down on us, nor did they stage this weakness, wickedness and folly for any reason at all. We, the actors, must play our wretched roles our whole lives long. But we owe no one our “thanks” for this, least of all any Creator God such as is preached to us by priests and theologians from their pulpits. know that it has done so:

We should not allow ourselves, then, to be made stupid by religion. To live means to suffer. We can neither find comfort in the face of this fact from the thought of a loving Creator, nor can we shift the blame for it onto the Devil or some other evil spirit. Just why the metaphysical will-to-live has objectified itself in the form of us and our world we do not know. We only

But if we muster the courage to acknowledge this and to see the world and our own nature for what they really are, namely “blind will” without any transcendent sense or meaning to it, then we will surely be in a position better to handle the challenges of life.

Compassion as the Basis of Ethics

Like all great philosophers, Schopenhauer too composed an “ethics”, that is to say, a doctrine of what it is to act well and rightly. Initially, it may seem impossible, given what we have already said about Schopenhauer’s thought, that he should have set about doing such a thing. How, we might ask, would human beings even be capable of doing what is right and good if we are constantly driven on, in all our actions, by a blind and hungry “will-to-live”? Does Schopenhauer himself not lengthily portray egoism as the basic, essential attitude of human beings toward the world and relations between these human beings, consequently, as a constant struggle of all against all?