Arthur Schopenhauer
Taking suffering seriously rather than justifying it: against the blind will-to-live that drives us, art grants truces, compassion grounds morality, renunciation alone delivers.
German · 1788 – 1860
A German philosopher, Schopenhauer published his single system at thirty, (1818), which went ignored for more than thirty years before the (1851) brought him late fame. An avowed heir of and , and the first major European philosopher to draw the Upanishads and into his thought, he built, against the speculative optimism of whom he fought all his life, a metaphysics of the that makes suffering the ground of existence and seeks deliverance in art, , and . Written in a novelist's prose, his philosophy marked , , and as much as artists, from Wagner to Thomas Mann.
The world is for a subject and, at bottom, Will: a blind willing, without reason or goal, of which our body is the immediate manifestation.
Existence is a business that does not cover its costs: suffering is the ground of life, and optimism a bitter mockery of humanity's unspeakable ills.
Every desire is born of a lack, hence of suffering: once satisfied, it yields only a negative pleasure that lapses into , and life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom.
There is no meaning to be realized in the world, only a deliverance to be won against it: through contemplation, , then , the can deny itself.
The foundation of morality is neither reason nor duty but : the experience by which another's suffering becomes immediately my motive, because the that separates us is an illusion.
Justification
Etiology, the science of causes, explains the ordered relations between phenomena but leaves whole the riddle of their inner essence: it always says how, never what. Science is thus sovereign in its own order and, in principle, insufficient, with metaphysics, art, and mysticism taking over where it stops.
The World as Will and Representation, §17
Justification
Philosophy does not transform the world and issues no rules: it interprets and deciphers given existence, repeating in abstract concepts the riddle the world poses. Contemplation first, then; but this understanding opens onto the one thing that truly matters, the question of deliverance, which tinges it with self-transformation.
Philosophy can never do more than interpret and explain what exists.The World as Will and Representation, §53
The World as Will and Representation, §53
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Justification
Primacy goes to intuition: the concept only fixes and stores, in abstract coin, what perception alone first gives; discursive reason is sterile away from that source. But intuition is itself already shaped by the a priori structures inherited from , hence a mixed position that leans toward empiricism without belonging to it.
The World as Will and Representation, Book I
Justification
The Platonic Ideas, grades of the will's objectification, are more real than the individuals that reflect them: at that level he is frankly a realist. Abstract concepts, by contrast, are only 'representations of representations,' mere tools of reason with no reality of their own, which tempers the realism with a nominalist side.
The World as Will and Representation, Book III
Justification
The whole edifice rests on the refusal of consolations: optimism is not merely false but indecent before the world's suffering, and seeing to the bottom of the Will is the condition of all wisdom. Deliverance comes through more lucidity, contemplation and the negation of willing, never through a better-chosen illusion.
The World as Will and Representation (1818)
Justification
For him pessimism is not a mood but an argued thesis: since willing is infinite lack, suffering is essential to life, not accidental, pleasure being merely the momentary cessation of a pain. To the systems of progress and final harmony he opposes the plain evidence of hospitals, prisons, and battlefields.
Optimism, when it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words beneath their flat foreheads, seems to me not only an absurd but a truly wicked way of thinking: a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity.The World as Will and Representation, §59
The World as Will and Representation, §59
Justification
To will is to lack: every desire springs from a painful privation, and its satisfaction, purely negative, falls at once into a new desire or into , which lays bare the emptiness of existence the moment nothing occupies it. The wheel of stops for an instant only in disinterested contemplation, and is broken only in the denial of the will; to those who cannot renounce, the Aphorisms concede no more than a prudent economy of desire.
So life swings like a pendulum, back and forth, between pain and boredom.The World as Will and Representation, §57
The World as Will and Representation, §57
Justification
The world offers no end to realize: the is aimless and history accomplishes nothing. The only way out is soteriological: that the will, recognizing itself in the universal spectacle of suffering, turn against itself and deny itself, through the voluntary whose model the saints and mystics of every tradition provide. This final 'nothing' is not despair but deliverance, which Schopenhauer likens, in a personal and now contested reading of the Indian traditions, to the Buddhist .
To all who are still filled with the will, what remains after its complete abolition is assuredly nothing. But conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, it is this very real world of ours, with all its suns and galaxies, that is nothing.The World as Will and Representation, §71
The World as Will and Representation, §71
Justification
The body holds a unique metaphysical position in the system: it is the only thing given to us twice, as one representation among others and as will felt from within. This double knowledge is the keystone of the whole edifice: it is through the body, not through reasoning, that we know what the world is at bottom.
The act of will and the movement of the body are not two objectively known states linked by causality; they are one and the same thing.The World as Will and Representation, §18
The World as Will and Representation, §18
Justification
The prize essay of 1839 establishes that every act follows necessarily from the innate character and the motives presented: the freedom of indifference is an illusion born of the consciousness of doing 'what I will,' which masks that I do not choose what I will. Yet he preserves, inherited from , the freedom of the intelligible character: the being (esse) is free, the acting (operari) is necessary, and responsibility bears on what we are, not on any isolated act.
You can do what you will; but at any given moment of your life you can will only one determinate thing, and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.On the Freedom of the Will, ch. III
On the Freedom of the Will, ch. III
Justification
The declared ideal is : chastity, voluntary poverty, fasting, by which the body, the most immediate objectification of the will, is methodically starved in order to break the will-to-live. But this is the ideal of the saint, which the philosopher describes without embodying it: Schopenhauer lived as a gourmet rentier and owned the gap, no more than a sculptor need be beautiful himself does the philosopher need to be a saint to draw the saint's portrait.
It is no more necessary for the saint to be a philosopher than for the philosopher to be a saint; just as it is not necessary for a perfectly beautiful person to be a great sculptor, or for a great sculptor to be a beautiful person.The World as Will and Representation, §68
The World as Will and Representation, §68
Justification
Hope is the falsification of judgment by desire: the will corrupts the intellect and makes us hold probable what we wish, mistaking our wishes for forecasts. Wisdom consists in facing the worst and expecting nothing, not out of bitterness, but so as to stop being the plaything of illusion.
Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life'
Justification
A threefold consolation against the fear of death: the symmetry argument, the state after our death is none other than the state before our birth, hence a matter of indifference; death as the 'muse of philosophy,' without which one would hardly philosophize; and the indestructibility of our being-in-itself, the will, which knows neither time nor end, though no person survives.
The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, ch. 41, 'On Death'
Justification
Only the present is real: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and whoever lives in expectation of a future happiness always lives 'later,' deferring his life. The very form of existence is a present without extension, a moving point on which the task is to stand rather than to flee ahead.
Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life', ch. V
Justification
Operari sequitur esse: acting follows being, each acts only in accordance with what he already is, and existence merely unrolls an essence given in advance. It is the exact opposite of existential freedom: one does not make oneself, one discovers oneself determined, and the only freedom is the metaphysical one of the intelligible character.
On the Freedom of the Will, ch. III
Justification
What one is matters infinitely more than what one has or what one seems in others' eyes: the most constant source of happiness is inner wealth, the one good that fortune cannot take back. Hence the value of solitude and of one's own company, against worldly dispersion.
Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life', ch. II
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Justification
Individuality holds only by the , the space and time that parcel the single will into a multitude of separate beings; the soul-substance is a fiction. What is indestructible in us is therefore not the person, doomed to come undone, but the impersonal will that ran through it.
The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, ch. 41
Justification
A revealing tension: nothing justifies suffering, and compassion commands relieving it everywhere, which pulls him toward abolitionism; but great pain 'sobers,' breaks the attachment to willing, and opens the second road to deliverance. Suffering has no meaning, it has an effect, which forbids ranking it wholly on the side of pure evil to be abolished.
The World as Will and Representation, §68
Justification
Death is the 'muse of philosophy,' and our condition is understood only by facing it: noisy sociability and worldly bustle are above all the flight of empty minds that cannot bear their own company. Recollection, not diversion, opens onto the essential.
Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life'
Justification
The moral circle extends to everything that suffers: animals, manifestations of the same will as ourselves, are the direct object of , and he reproaches Christianity and alike for having made beasts into mere things for our use, a doctrine he finds 'revolting and abominable.' The moral boundary runs at sentience, not at reason; the background stays metaphysical, the same will throughout nature, which lends it a biocentric tinge.
Compassion for animals is so intimately bound up with goodness of character that one may confidently assert that whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.On the Basis of Morality, §19
On the Basis of Morality, §19
Justification
The Metaphysics of Sexual Love, whose novelty he proudly claims, unmasks in passion the ruse of the : the illusion by which the genius of the species makes the individual, thinking he pursues his own happiness, serve the making of the next generation. Love as charity, for its part, belongs to compassion, and eros as lack is traced back to suffering.
Every amorous attachment, however ethereal it may pretend to be, has its roots in the sexual instinct alone.The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, ch. 44
The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, ch. 44, 'The Metaphysics of Sexual Love'
Justification
Egoism is the 'colossal' spring of empirical man, who refers everything to himself and would, he says, sooner see the world destroyed than himself. But this spring is precisely amoral: only an action whose motive is another's good has moral worth, and virtue does not consist in reckoning one's interest better but in stepping outside it.
On the Basis of Morality, §14
Justification
His moral formula has two tiers: 'harm no one' (justice), a strict and fully enforceable duty, and 'help everyone as much as you can' (loving-kindness), which has no fixed bound and overflows mere obligation. The core of obligation is negative, but true charity is without measure, which keeps him from the minimalist camp.
On the Basis of Morality, §17
Justification
He mocks national pride without mercy, 'the cheapest' of prides, that of the man who, having nothing personal to be proud of, falls back on the nation he shares with millions of others. A cosmopolitan and polyglot mind, nourished by East and West, he holds truth to have no homeland.
The cheapest sort of pride is national pride.Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life', ch. IV
Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life', ch. IV
Justification
Against : history is not a science, for science knows the general and history reports only the particular; it has neither law nor meaning and accomplishes no progress of Spirit. It tells, in changing costumes, the endless repetition of the same, according to his motto eadem, sed aliter, the same things, but otherwise.
The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, ch. 38, 'On History'
Justification
Punishment looks to the future, not the past: to punish for the wrong already done, with no further end, would be to return evil for evil, mere vengeance without right. The law is a threat meant to counterbalance the motives of crime by fear, and its execution merely keeps the promise of that threat so that it retains its deterrent force.
The World as Will and Representation, §62
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Justification
His ethics describes rather than prescribes: from compassion flow the two cardinal virtues, justice, harm no one, and loving-kindness, help others as much as you can, embodied in characters more than in rules. By its affective, relational grounding, this ethics of anticipates the ethics of care; by its psychology of innate characters, it keeps a family resemblance to virtue ethics; deontological formalism is expressly rejected.
On the Basis of Morality, §§16-22
Justification
Since character is innate and unchanging, whoever has wronged you once carries within him the power to do it again: to forget would be imprudent. The forgiveness that erases hard-won experience squanders a dearly bought knowledge of men; one may cease to bear a grudge without erasing what the offence revealed of the character.
To forgive and forget is to throw out of the window precious experience that one has dearly bought.Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life'
Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life'
Justification
The state is no educator and has no moral end: it arises from the contract by which frightened egoisms, reckoning that they lose more by suffering wrong than they gain by doing it, give themselves a common muzzle. Necessary against human malice, it is thereby legitimate and without grandeur, and anarchism, which bets on a natural goodness, is a chimera.
The World as Will and Representation, §62
Justification
The parable of the porcupines says it all: pressed by the cold they draw together, but their quills force them apart, and they end by finding the right distance, that of politeness. The man of rich inner life prefers to suffer a little cold than to be pricked by contact, and holds solitude to be a privilege rather than a lack.
Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II, §396
Justification
No faith in moral progress or political reform: human nature does not change, only the muzzle can be better or worse fitted, and history merely varies the same. Frightened by the 1848 revolution, he lent his opera glass to the soldiers taking aim at the rioters and left part of his fortune to the fund for wounded soldiers, a gesture in which his pessimism turns frankly counter-revolutionary.
Parerga and Paralipomena; correspondence and biography
Justification
The first book of begins from a radicalized Kantian premise: the world exists only as , under the a priori forms of space, time, and causality. But where left the unknowable, Schopenhauer holds that we have a unique access to it: our body, known from without as representation and from within as will. Materialism is refuted as the philosophy 'of the subject that forgets itself in its own reckoning'; his idealism nonetheless remains singular, since the ground of the real is not mind but blind willing.
The world is my representation.The World as Will and Representation, Book I, §1
The World as Will and Representation, Book I, §1
Justification
Against , whose categorical imperative he dismantles as a disguised moral theology, he holds that an action has moral worth only if its motive is , the immediate and disinterested participation in another's suffering, 'the primal and mysterious phenomenon of ethics.' Reason is merely an instrument in the service of the will: it calculates means, it does not make one good, and the clever egoist is only the more dangerous for it.
This compassion alone is the actual basis of all free justice and all genuine loving-kindness.On the Basis of Morality, §16
On the Basis of Morality, §16
Justification
An explicit and argued atheism: a world whose very substance is suffering cannot be the work of a good God, and the will that grounds it is blind, without wisdom or aim. He salutes in a lofty religion without a God, and takes pantheism to be 'a polite way of dismissing God,' the undue deification of a wretched world.
Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II, 'On Religion: A Dialogue'
Justification
Boundless egoism is the natural spring of man, up to disinterested malice, that cruelty which delights in another's suffering for its own sake; civilization muzzles this ground without transforming it. The state is not an educator but a muzzle.
Man is at bottom a wild and terrible animal.Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II, § 114 ('On Ethics')
Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II, 'On Ethics'
Justification
Art delivers a knowledge that science cannot reach: , become a pure subject of knowing, grasps the Ideas, the eternal forms of things, and communicates them. This contemplation is at the same time deliverance, for beauty suspends the will and the wrests us from it by main force. Music holds a place apart: a copy not of the Ideas but of the will itself, it is the metaphysics of the world made audible.
The World as Will and Representation, Book III, §§34-52
Justification
A reversal of : this world is not the best but the worst of all possible worlds, for a world even slightly worse could no longer subsist. Evil is not a deficiency of being to be excused but the positive substance of existence, a decisive proof against any good creator; every theodicy is thereby an indecency.
The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, ch. 46, 'On the Vanity and Suffering of Life'
Justification
Character is innate, constant, and beyond the reach of education: velle non discitur, willing cannot be taught. One can instruct the intellect and refine the means, never change the ground of what someone wills; nature commands, and circumstance only furnishes its occasions.
On the Freedom of the Will, ch. III
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Justification
A double thesis: the intellect is a function of the brain, a secondary, late, and fatigable phenomenon, which has materialist overtones; but the ground of all things, from the mineral to man, is will. Less a panpsychism in the strict sense than a doctrine of the universal objectification of the Will: it is not mind that is everywhere, but blind willing.
On the Will in Nature
Justification
Religion is the 'metaphysics of the people': true under the veil of allegory, false taken literally, it says in images what philosophy thinks in concepts. Faith and knowledge cannot honestly lodge in one and the same head, but the metaphysical need that feeds them both is ineradicable.
Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II, 'On Religion: A Dialogue'
Justification
Art is a 'quietive' of the will, a Sabbath in which the forced labour of desire ceases for a moment, and as such the aesthetic experience is the highest of the goods accessible within the world. But it does not last, the genius is not the saint, and the final hierarchy places ethical holiness, the denial of the will, above the mere contemplation of beauty.
The World as Will and Representation, Books III and IV
Justification
The perceives, in the very same thing, what the ordinary man, wholly given over to willing and to use, will never see: there are highly unequal degrees in the capacity to contemplate. The pleasures of the mind sharply rank men, and the 'philistine' is defined by his incapacity to enjoy without interest.
Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life'
Justification
The same will objectifies itself by degrees in gravitation, the crystal, the plant, the animal, and man: our place in nature is not that of a master but of one grade among others of a single blind energy. This metaphysical kinship grounds direct duties toward animals and rejects the idea that man is the sovereign owner of the living.
On the Will in Nature; On the Basis of Morality, §19
Aesthetic contemplation as a truce of the willExerciseRelation to desire
To stop willing for a moment, and be nothing but vision.
For , desire is a painful tension without rest: as long as we will, we lack. But before a beautiful work, a landscape, or a piece of music, it can happen that we stop willing for a moment: we become pure vision, and the pain of desire falls silent. This exercise is about deliberately arranging such truces, not to possess or to judge, but to contemplate without interest.
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The inventory of absent illsHabitTonality of reality
Do not count what you lack, but the ills that, right now, are sparing you.
holds happiness to be negative: pleasure is only the cessation of a pain, and we feel neither our health, nor the roof that shelters us, nor the misfortunes that spare us, so long as they are present. Hence a counsel of wisdom: instead of counting what we lack, learn to notice the ills that, at this moment, are spared us. It is the surest way to be a little less unhappy.
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The porcupine's right distanceStanceIndividual and society
Close enough to keep warm, far enough not to be pricked.
In a famous fable, describes porcupines that, numb with cold, huddle against one another, but whose quills force them apart; by trial and error they find the middle distance where one keeps warm without being pricked, and this distance, he says, is called politeness. The stance to cultivate: neither the fusion that wounds nor the solitude that freezes, but a warmth held at the right distance, all the wider the more one carries within oneself the means to keep oneself company.
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