This was about my boy Arty Schopie. I <3 him.
Contained within Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the Will, there are ideas and themes that, even after years of study, could still be unpacked and re-interpreted to have differing, nuanced meanings. This rule of flexibility—applying itself and mirroring thought systems ranging from modern biological or scientific realism to Hinduism and the Four Noble Truths—appears to be consistent throughout Schopenhauer’s work; his own view of his writings was more in line with that of a symphony than a Critique of Pure Reason.
However, there does appear to be a notable exception that exists to this general rule regarding Schopenhauer’s philosophy—an exception that concerns a thought process that, by its very nature, colors and corrupts everything around it. Upon first, second, and perhaps even third readings of Schopenhauer’s symphony in “The World as Will and Representation,” it appears that he is crafting a deeply pessimistic worldview. This is not an interesting conclusion, frankly—the far more interesting conclusion lies in the answer to the question: “to what extent was Schopenhauer truly philosophically pessimistic?”
Philosophical pessimism, in its most simple formulation is an attitude that holds that the average temporal object of analysis is, on balance, not good. This basic proposition can be extended to all things: an ethical pessimist would hold that human nature makes ethical interaction impossible; the epistemological pessimist would hold that absolute knowledge is impossible. Extending pessimism to humans and their rationality for application to Schopenhauer, this attitude would refer to the essential quality of humans, as objectified Will with rationality, are never satisfied due to the will’s constant striving—that happiness is impossible on an individual level. This blanket definition may prove to be insufficient, though; it is fairly clear that Schopenhauer vacuously agrees with that reductive mode of analyzing pessimism.
Rather, it would be instructive to look at three specific stances of the so-called “composite pessimist” that appear throughout the vast majority of so-called philosophically pessimistic writing and compare Schopenhauer’s stance (and evidencing thereof) to the lattice of “composite pessimism.” For the purposes of this analysis, the pessimistic stance shall be divided in to three main categories: anti-theism, misanthropy, and the pessimistic coup-de-grace: antinatalism.
Anti-theism is a stance toward religion that, while similar to atheism in a few foundational aspects, provides for a far more radical critique, as a whole. Atheism, simply put, is an opposition to the proposed existence of a god. Colloquially (and somewhat paradoxically) speaking, atheism’s definition allows for a Christian to be an atheist, too—the Christian denies the existence of alternative deities to the Holy Trinity. In contrast, the anti-theist denies and opposes the potential for the existence of a god. This may appear to be an insignificant distinction at first, but the simplified explanation is that the atheist disbelieves the discrete deity, whereas the anti-theist possesses a worldview that makes the existence, and even perhaps the existence of the idea of a deity moot or unintelligible. Applying this anti-theist schema to Schopenhauer’s, now, it can be seen that, at the very least, he did not believe in any deity whatsoever. Going beyond the relatively dangerous choice that non-believers made in that time in history, within “The World as Will and Representation,” Schopenhauer actually provides evidence that he was more radically inclined than most of his contemporaries through his conception of the Will. Since St. Augustine, religious justifications for the existence of god have relied on a platonic split between an ideal realm and the material—with an all-benevolent, all-seeing, immanent, and unintelligible noumenon being the driving force of the deity. Schopenhauer wanted to preserve Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal distinction from Hegel’s abrogation of dualism with absolute mind, but he took a somewhat different take on the noumenon. Schopenhauer’s Will is a far different beast than any platonic telos. Will, for Schopenhauer, is the driving motivation behind all events, and all phenomenal events and objects are merely aspects or objectifications of this irrational, infinite will. To wit:
“All idea, of whatever kind it may be, all object, is phenomenal existence, but the will alone is a thing in itself. As such, it is throughout not idea, but toto genere different from it; it is that of which all idea, all object, is the phenomenal appearance, the visibility, the objectification. It is the inmost nature, the kernel, of every particular thing, and also of the whole. It appears in every blind force of nature and also in the preconsidered action of man; and the great difference between these two is merely in the degree of the manifestation, not in the nature of what manifests itself.[1]
In taking this conception of Schopenhauer’s noumenon and comparing it to traditional deity figures, a couple of contrasts can be drawn that help to illustrate his view on the existence of god. Schopenhauer’s Will clearly aligns with the necessary conditions of immanence and unintelligibility; the Will is immanent in that it is the driving inertial force behind all action, and the irrational Will, especially in it’s wanton nature, is unknowable to the mere human objectifications of it. According to Schopenhauer, “the will as a thing-in-itself lies outside the province of the principle of sufficient reason in all its forms, and is consequently completely groundless, although all its manifestations are entirely subordinated to the principle of sufficient reason.”[2] Translated, this quotation states that we can never know the nature of Will, as knowledge is tied to the decidedly phenomenal objects applicable to the principle of sufficient reason; the Will is groundless for our phenomenal ways of knowing. It is interesting to note this metaphysical profile of the Will, as it is rare to find prominent philosophers who manage to make a clear atheism and a clear idealism or dualism reconcile with one another.
The correspondence ends there however, as Schopenhauer’s necessary irrational quality of the Will disqualifies it from participating in the benevolence and omnipotence required of a deity. In this sense, that the Will is necessarily irrational, Schopenhauer’s conception of the noumenon fits in with anti-theism as his system categorically denies the potential for such a being to exist. With application to anti-theism, Schopenhauer’s conception of the Will fits in with one of the criteria of pessimism.
Misanthropy is an easier concept to grip than the relative hair-splitting of anti-theism; misanthropes hate humanity. Though that is a deceptively reductive way of wording the philosophical proposition of misanthropy, it is entirely appropriate. Misanthropes, justified in a belief in some essential quality in human nature, believe that humans are necessarily evil, maladjusted, or broken. The portion of philosophical importance in this proposition, that the quality of humankind that makes it worthy of hatred is essential and categorical in all humans, is incredibly easy to apply to Schopenhauer’s writings—almost in a facile way; Schopenhauer’s belief in the insatiable, striving Will tends to lead to dim conclusions about the ability of humans to resist temporal pleasures.
Evidence to this fact exists in his illustration of the ascetic life—a life marked by a focus on the self and woe as opposed to the other and happiness—which is seldom reached by many humans. Salvation, the co-opted Christian language that represents an endpoint in Schopenhauer’s ethics, is only possible for the ascetic, the Saint, and the sufferer[3]. Schopenhauer describes it as “denoted by the names ecstasy, rapture, illumination, union with God, and so forth; a state, however, which cannot properly be called knowledge, because it has not the form of subject and object.”[4] This is important, as he is essentially allowing that true salvation is a state of removal from existence as our bodies (as objectified Will) know it—a denial of the Will to live. If extended, this line of thought dictates that Schopenhauer’s model of existence holds that humans are damned to be slaves to their insatiable Will, unless they die or pass in to a state in which “the will has turned and has denied itself; this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways—is nothing.”[5]
Though the conception of Salvation is significant in leading Schopenhauer to be characterized as a misanthrope, his views on the genius and aesthetic experience mitigate slightly the proposition that humans are categorically malformed. However, as is the case with saints, sufferers, and ascetics, the geniuses are few and far in-between, and aesthetic abating of the insatiability of the Will—the disinterestedness of truly sublime and transcendent experience—is far too infrequent to topple its overpowering nature. It is probably fair, then, to assert that Schopenhauer is at least slightly misanthropic—at least inasmuch as in needed to relate to a larger pessimism.
Antinatalism is, perhaps, the aspect of pessimism in which Schopenhauer had the greatest correspondence; to wit, he is considered one of the intellectual fathers of the modern antinatalist movement. Of the three proposed aspects of the composite pessimism, antinatalism is the easiest to sum up with a pithy sentence: it is better to have never been born than to have lived at all. This belief is commonly forged by the corresponding belief that, on balance, there is more suffering than pleasure in life—life is suffering. Vacuously, if there is more suffering than pleasure in the aggregate over the course of a life, that life was not worth living; the antinatalist says that very few, if any lives ever reach a breakeven point. Schopenhauer agrees: happiness is fleeting until the Will finds a new imperative for your body to act on; Salvation lies in near non-existence. This is the aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy that can be viewed as his most profoundly pessimistic. The fact that his conception of the Will leads to the conclusion that life, on average in aggregate, is more suffering than pleasure means that it is a problem of categories: life is never worth living. This conclusion leads to the interesting problem of suicide and its ethical permissibility in Schopenhauer, but there is no debate for the German when it comes to the option of being born: never having existed is preferable. This is vacuously and self-evidently pessimistic in conclusion: Schopenhauer clearly fits this criterion.
Schopenhauer’s work when looked at in regard to philosophical pessimism does the same thing that it does to all other philosophies—twists in and around it, but never fully penetrates or inhabits it. Though most of this time this comparative deficiency was by design—Schopenhauer was a true original, after all—it may be the case with regard to pessimism that Schopenhauer was so profoundly pessimistic that he set the rubric for pessimism in its modern forms. Simply looking at the main propositions of the “composite pessimism,” it has been proven that his overall philosophy of the Will corresponds with the main contentions of the corpus.