Journal Four: Schopenhauer the Pessimist;

or How I Learned to Be More Depressed Than I Already Was

“A pessimist is one who feels bad when he feels good for fear he'll feel worse when he feels better.” -Unknown

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in the city of Danzig (Gdańsk) as the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer and Johanna Schopenhauer, who were both descendants of wealthy German middle class mercantile families in the city located on the Baltic Sea. (Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, Page xxx).

He formulated a pessimistic philosophy that gained importance and support after the failure of the German and Austrian revolutions of 1848. A major aspect of Schopenhauer's philosophy is the investigation of what makes man less than reasonable. He calls this force "Wille zum Leben" or Will (lit. will-to-life), by which he means the forces driving man; to remain alive, to reproduce. A drive intertwined with desire. This Will is the inner content and the driving force of the world.

For Schopenhauer, Will had primacy over the intellect. In other words, he believed that desire is understood to be prior to thought, and, in a parallel sense, Will is said to be prior to being. Schopenhauer felt this was similar to notions of purushartha or goals of life in Vedanta Hinduism.

In attempting to solve or alleviate fundamental problems of life, Schopenhauer was a rare philosopher who considered philosophy and logic less important (or less effective) than art, certain charitable practices, and certain forms of religious discipline. Schopenhauer concluded that discursive thought (such as philosophy and logic) could neither touch nor transcend the nature of desire — i.e., Will.

In The World as Will and Representation (1886), Schopenhauer proposed that humans living in the realm of objects are living in the realm of desire, and thus are eternally tormented by that desire. The role of desire in Schopenhauer is similar to the role of Kāma, sensual gratification, which is treated as one of the goals of life relating to the second stage of life in the Hindu tradition.

The fact is, although he has many things to say that are of value (his stance on suicide for example), I find it better not to think about Schopenhauer’s philosophy too much. It can be emotionally draining, especially at a time in your life when things aren’t going so good for you.

He is perhaps the most cantankerous expounder (I love my thesaurus) of his ideas of right and wrong that I have ever read. He gets into such detail about the things that annoy him, and with such earnest grumpiness that at times like these, his idea that we live in the worst of all possible worlds seems like it could be writ in stone. Global warming, illegal wars, religious fundamentalism, the 2-day sale at Macy’s, my cunt on wings ex-roommate, dogs and cats living together; mass hysteria!

It would be just so easy to throw up your arms, and say “fuck this culture” and go timeshare with Jeremiah Johnson; to subscribe to Schopenhauer's misanthropic opinion that "a happy man is one who can avoid most of his fellow creatures," but as the song lyric goes, sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.

First off, is it so bad that we have desires? Now obviously some specific desires, like the desire to torture or to start wars for financial gain are clearly bad. But is not the drive to improve oneself, or to continue your education after grade school a desire? Is not wanting to become a good parent a desire? I could go on for pages with more examples but I believe I have made my case.

Secondly, although I don’t dispute that we have a will to life, is it truly the driving force for everyone? Did Schopenhauer never meet or read about the people who stepped in front of bullets to save a friend or a loved one or a cause? What would Arthur have thought of the monks who set themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam War?

However, despite his crabby sensibility (to put it kindly), there’s plenty to admire and mull over in his work. In On Language and Words, he writes:

This confirms that one thinks differently in every language, that our thinking is modified and newly tinged through the learning of each foreign language, and that polyglotism is, apart from its many immediate advantages, a direct means of educating the mind by correcting and perfecting our perceptions through the emerging diversity and refinement of concepts.

What a beautiful idea; learning a foreign language becomes a path to a greater understanding of the world and of us. I myself have tried several times to learn another language, but have always failed those classes rather miserably, even Spanish despite that fact that I’ve been fairly immersed in it for the past 16 years.

But I’m getting sidetracked here, I apologize. I am sure that Schopenhauer would have some stern reprimands for how I write this essay. This is supposed to be about pessimism and do I believe that the will drives the intellect or vice versa.

I may as well just admit that I have no clue what to believe. I consider myself to be a very smart person. My last IQ test gave me a score of 118 which is defined as Superior intelligence on I am well read, and I currently have a 3.33 GPA.

But Schopenhauer leaves me feeling confused, unsure what to think, and to put it bluntly, stupid. I read the passages of his work and with the exception of the ones I’ve mentioned about language, and some ones on the subject of writing which I’ve not quoted here due to lack of relevance to a philosophy course, I only get more and more upset with myself, because I don’t think I could do justice to the topic.

Ultimately, it may turn out, as it often does in cases of the question of what drives human behavior, that there is no set answer; that it depends on the individual.

For many it may well be true that they are driven by a blind irrational will then they use their intellect to justify it as Schopenhauer believes all humans do, but for others the English and Scottish Empiricists may be right, and for others still there a drive that no philosopher has stumbled upon yet.

So to close, what I will is say that I disagree with Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but I do so with an asterisks.

“If you ever get close to a human
and human behaviour
be ready to get confused”

- Human Behaviour, Bjork