Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer

Kant had left philosophy with a locked door. We can know the world only as it appears to us, he had shown, never as it is in itself; the ultimate reality, the thing-in-itself, lies forever beyond our reach. Schopenhauer accepted nearly all of it but one point, and that single exception became the most original idea of the nineteenth century. There is, he realized, exactly one thing in the universe that we know not merely from the outside, as an appearance, but from the inside, as it really is: ourselves. When you move your arm, you do not just observe the motion from without, the way you watch a falling stone; you live it from within, as desire, effort, striving, will. Your own body is the one corner of reality you experience from both sides at once, as object and as will, and from the inside what you find is not reason, not idea, but a restless, blind wanting. And Schopenhauer made the staggering generalization: this is what everything is, underneath. The inner reality of the whole world, the thing-in-itself behind every appearance, is will, a single, blind, insatiable striving, which shows up as gravity in the stone, as growth in the plant, as hunger in the animal, and as desire in you. We are not, at bottom, thinking things adrift in a world of dead matter. We are will, in a universe that is nothing but will, wanting itself into existence forever, and for no reason at all.

A wanting that cannot be fed. Here Schopenhauer earned his reputation as the great pessimist, though "pessimist" is too small a word for the clarity of what he saw. If the core of you, and of everything, is endless wanting, then suffering is not an accident of life but its very structure. To desire is to lack, and to lack is to suffer; we are in pain precisely insofar as we want something we do not have, which is almost always. And the cruel twist is that getting it does not save us. The satisfaction of a desire is brief, a moment's relief, before a new desire rushes in to take its place, or, worse, before boredom sets in, that peculiar emptiness that descends when, for once, we want nothing and discover that a life without wanting feels like almost nothing at all. So existence swings, Schopenhauer says, like a pendulum, between pain, when desire is unsatisfied, and boredom, when it is, with only fleeting flickers of relief in between and never a stable contentment, because the will can never be permanently filled. This is bleak, and Schopenhauer did not flinch from the conclusion: that on balance the pleasure of life does not pay for its pain, and that it would have been better, cosmically speaking, had the whole striving business never started up at all. You need not accept the verdict to feel the force of the diagnosis, because every one of us has known the strange letdown of finally getting the thing we were sure would make us happy, and finding that somehow it did not.

The puppet and the strings. What makes Schopenhauer not merely a poet of gloom but a pivot of modern thought is where he put the will: not on top of the mind, but underneath it. For the whole prior tradition, reason was the master and the desires its unruly servants; the rational self sat in the driver's seat. Schopenhauer turned this upside down. The will, he argued, is primary, and the intellect is its tool, a lantern the will holds up to find what it already blindly wants. We do not reason our way to our desires; we desire, and then our reason scrambles to justify what the will has already decided. Most of what drives us, he saw, operates below awareness, in the dark, and the conscious mind is forever inventing flattering reasons for choices that were made beneath it, by a will it does not control and barely glimpses. This was a revolutionary and unsettling claim, that we are not the rational, self-transparent beings we imagine but are largely run by forces we cannot see, and it became one of the foundation stones of the modern world. Half a century later, a young doctor in Vienna named Freud would build an entire science of the mind on essentially this insight, the primacy of unconscious drive over conscious reason, and would freely admit how much of it Schopenhauer had seen first. The idea that there is a stranger inside us, quietly pulling the strings, begins here.

A holiday from the self. Schopenhauer was bleak, but he was not without escapes, and the first of them is the most universally felt. When you lose yourself completely in a great painting, a landscape, a poem, a piece of music, something rare and precious happens: for a moment, the wanting stops. You are no longer a striving, grasping self in pursuit of its endless desires; you become a pure, calm, disinterested beholder, absorbed entirely in the thing before you, and the restless will falls silent. This, Schopenhauer thought, is the secret of why beauty consoles us, why we come out of a concert or a gallery feeling washed clean: art gives us a holiday from ourselves, a brief release from the tyranny of our own wanting. And of all the arts he ranked one supreme, music. The other arts, he said, show us images drawn from the world of appearances; but music does not represent the visible world at all, it represents the will itself, the inner striving reality directly, made audible. That is why music reaches us so much more deeply than words, why it can move us to tears for no nameable reason, why it seems to speak the secret language of our own depths: it is the thing-in-itself, singing. No philosopher has ever paid music a higher compliment, and none has done more to shape how the modern world hears it. Wagner, reading these pages, found his own art explained to him, and composed Tristan und Isolde in their light.

That thou art. The second escape runs deeper, and it turns Schopenhauer's grim metaphysics, unexpectedly, into a tender ethics. If, underneath the appearances, there is only one will, then the division between you and every other suffering creature is, at the deepest level, an illusion, a trick played by space and time, which slice the single will into the appearance of countless separate selves. Most of the time we are fooled by it completely, and treat the boundary of our own skin as the boundary of what matters. But in genuine compassion, Schopenhauer says, the illusion briefly tears: when you suffer with another, feel their pain as if it were your own, you are seeing through the veil to the truth that, in the deepest reality, it is your own, because underneath you and they are the same will. Compassion, for him, is not a mere sentiment but a kind of metaphysical clarity, a momentary glimpse of the unity that the everyday self conceals, and it is the true basis of all morality, deeper than any rule or commandment. And here Schopenhauer made a discovery that thrilled him: the sages of ancient India had seen the same thing, long before. In the Upanishads he found the phrase tat tvam asi, "that thou art," you are that other being, that suffering animal, that stranger; and in Buddhism he found his own conclusions, that craving is the root of suffering and that peace lies in its quieting, already laid out as a path to walk. He was the first great Western philosopher to take the wisdom of the East seriously as philosophy, because he recognized in its ancient words the very truths he had reasoned out alone.

The case against existence. The room reads Schopenhauer in the old translations, cited by work and section, and you will find, to your surprise, that the prophet of gloom is one of the most enjoyable philosophers ever to write, lucid, witty, savage, endlessly quotable, a deliberate rebuke to the foggy German systems of his day. He despised Hegel above all others, scheduled his own university lectures at the very hour Hegel taught in order to lure away his students, drew almost no one, and never forgave the world for preferring the optimist. For decades almost no one read him; he was past sixty when fame at last arrived, in time for a long, vindicated, lonely celebrity. And then his influence detonated. The young Nietzsche fell under his spell and spent the rest of his life both honoring and fighting him, accepting the diagnosis of the irrational will while violently rejecting the verdict of despair, turning Schopenhauer's pessimism inside out into a fierce yes to life. Wagner set his philosophy to music. Freud built a science on his unconscious. Tolstoy and Mann and Borges and Wittgenstein all carried him in their bones. You may decide, in the end, that he was too dark, that he mistook a mood for a metaphysics. But no one has ever stated more honestly the case for the prosecution against existence, or located more precisely the engine of human restlessness, and a philosophy that the world spent a generation ignoring and a century unable to forget is not one any thinking person can simply wave away.