PESSIMISM
Schopenhauer's system is set forth in all its fulness in his great
work, _The World as Will and Idea_. All that he wrote after the
appearance of this book was confirmation and expansion of the theories
already laid down. It differs from his earlier books in method. He no
longer follows academic lines. He looks upon the work as a revelation
of the meaning of life, based on a clear and direct intuition into
life, and the style shapes itself accordingly. Metaphor frequently
takes the place of argument, and his theories are developed in a flow
of passionate eloquence, contrasting remarkably with the severer
methods of the ordinary metaphysician.
Schopenhauer takes as his starting-point certain theories from the
philosophies of Plato and Kant. Things, as we know them in experience,
said Kant, are made up partly of forms or moulds, which are in the
mind, and partly of something outside the mind. That which we know,
our actual experience, is a combination of the two elements, the
subjective and the objective element. That part of experience which
lies outside the mind, the reality, the thing-in-itself or the noumenon
in philosophical language, we can never know. For in order to be known
by us, it has to run into the forms or moulds supplied by the mind, and
in this transition its nature has been changed. To know it as it is,
before it enters into contact with our minds, is impossible. That we
{39} appear to have objective knowledge is therefore a deception and an
illusion.
Schopenhauer accepts Kant's analysis of experience, but denies that the
thing-in-itself is unknowable. For that which is real in our
experience is not outside us altogether, as in Kant's theory. It lies
within ourselves; it is the only real and essential part of our nature,
and we have a direct knowledge of it. This reality Schopenhauer finds
in the will. Now the will is fully known to us through internal
perception, through intuition. It is the real, inner nature of
everything in the world. It affords the key to the knowledge of the
inmost being of the whole of nature. It is the kernel of every
individual thing, and also of the whole universe.
It is important to note, that Schopenhauer's use of the word "will" is
far wider than that of common usage. It includes not only conscious
desire, but also unconscious instinct, and the forces of inorganic
nature. He recognises will not only in the existences which resemble
our own, in men and animals, but also in the force which germinates and
vegetates in the plant, the force through which the crystal is formed,
that by which the magnet turns to the north pole, the force which
appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and
attraction, decomposition and combination, and lastly even as
gravitation, which draws the stone to the earth and the earth to the
sun. All these in their inner nature are identical. It is the same
force in every manifestation of nature, as in each preconsidered action
of man. The difference is merely one of degree.
The body is the most real thing for everyone. If we analyse the
reality of this body, we find nothing but the will. With this its
reality is exhausted. The word {40} will, like a magic spell, he says,
reveals the inmost being of all nature. Spinoza says, that if a stone,
which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would
believe that it was moving of its own will. Schopenhauer adds that the
stone would be right. The impulse given it, is for the stone what the
motive is for us. All blindly impelling force, all forces which act in
nature in accordance with universal laws, are equally in their inner
nature to be recognised as will. It is everywhere one and the same,
"just as the first dim light of dawn must share the name of sunlight
with the rays of the full midday."
Now the will expresses itself necessarily as a struggle. Everywhere in
nature we see strife, conflict, and alternation of victory. Every
grade of will fights for the matter, the space, and the time of the
others. For each desires to express its own inmost nature. Nature
exists only through such struggle. This universal conflict is most
distinctly visible in the animal kingdom. For animals have the whole
of the vegetable kingdom for their food, and even within the animal
kingdom every beast is the prey and the food of another. Each animal
can maintain its existence only by the constant destruction of some
other life.
This is the "will to live" which everywhere preys upon itself, until
finally the human race regards nature as a manufactory for its own use.
This strife manifests itself just as characteristically in the lower
grades of will, _e.g._ the ivy which encircles the oak until the tree
withers as if choked, the parasite which fastens itself on the animal
and kills it. Even crude matter has its existence only in the strife
of conflicting forces.
Man has need of the beasts for his support, the beasts in their turn
have need of each other as well as plants, {41} which in their turn
require the ground, water, and chemical elements and their
combinations. Thus in nature everything preys on some other form of
life. For the will must live on itself; there exists nothing beside
it, and it is a hungry will.
This theory of the will is connected by Schopenhauer with pessimism.
Eternal becoming, endless flux characterises the inner nature of the
will. In the human race this character of the will is most clearly
marked. All our endeavours and desires delude us by presenting their
satisfaction as the final end of will. But as soon as we attain our
desires, they no longer appear the same. They soon grow stale and are
forgotten, and then are thrown aside as useless illusions. The
enchantment of distance shows us paradises, which vanish like optical
delusions, as soon as we have allowed ourselves to be mocked by them.
We are fortunate if there still remains something to wish for and to
strive after, that the game may be kept up of constant transition from
desire to satisfaction, and from satisfaction to a new desire.
Happiness, therefore, always lies in the future, or else in the past.
The present, Schopenhauer compares to a small dark cloud, which the
wind drives over the sunny plain. Before and behind it all is bright,
but the cloud itself always casts a shadow. The present is always
insufficient, the future is uncertain, and the past irrevocable.
The will strives always, for striving is its real nature. No
attainment of the goal can put an end to this constant striving. It is
not susceptible, therefore, of any final satisfaction, for in itself it
goes on for ever. As in the life of the plant, so in the life of all
men. There is the same restless, unsatisfied striving, a ceaseless
{42} movement through ever-ascending forms, until finally the seed
becomes a new starting-point. This is repeated _ad infinitum_, nowhere
an end, nowhere a final satisfaction, nowhere a resting-place. No
possible satisfaction in the world can suffice to still the cravings of
the will, to set a goal to its infinite aspirations, and to fill the
bottomless abyss of its heart.
The hindrance of this striving, through an obstacle, we call suffering;
the attainment of its temporary end is well-being or happiness. But as
there is no final end of striving, there is no measure and end of
suffering. In proportion as knowledge attains to distinctness, as
consciousness ascends in the scale of organic life, pain increases
also. It reaches its highest capacity, therefore, in man. The more
intelligence a man has, the greater his capacity for suffering; the man
who is gifted with genius suffers most of all. Suffering is in the
very nature of all life, and the ceaseless efforts which we make to
banish it succeed only in making it change its form. Yet we pursue our
lives, absorbed in the interests of the moment, just as we blow out a
soap bubble as large as possible, although we know perfectly well that
it will burst. Willing or striving may be compared to an unquenchable
thirst. Every act of willing presupposes a want. The basis of all
willing is need or deficiency. The nature of man, therefore, is
subject to pain originally and through its very nature.
If, on the other hand, man lacks objects of desire, being deprived of
them by too easy satisfaction, then a terrible emptiness and sense of
boredom, comes over him. His very existence becomes an unbearable
burden to him. Thus life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards
between pain and boredom. Men have {43} expressed this truth oddly,
says Schopenhauer, in transferring all pain and torments to hell, and
in leaving what remains, that is, boredom, for heaven. Man is of all
animals the most full of wants and needs. He is a concretion of a
thousand necessities. Driven by these, he wanders through life,
uncertain about everything except his own need and misery. The care
for the maintenance of his existence occupies, as a rule, the whole of
human life. A second claim, that of the reproduction of the species,
is related directly to this. At the same time, he is threatened from
all sides by different kinds of dangers, from which it requires
constant watchfulness to escape. "With cautious steps and casting
anxious glances round him, he pursues his path, for a thousand
accidents and a thousand enemies lie in wait for him. Thus he went
while yet a savage, thus he goes in civilised life. There is no
security for him."
The majority of men wage a constant battle for their very existence,
with nothing before them but the certainty of losing it at last. Man's
greatest care in avoiding the rocks and whirlpools of life, only bring
him nearer at every step to the greatest, inevitable, and irremediable
shipwreck of death. This is the final goal of the laborious voyage.
Whatever nature and fortune may have done, whoever a man be, and
whatever he may possess, the pain of life cannot be cast off.
Excessive joy and excessive suffering always occur in the same person,
for they condition each other reciprocally, and are conditioned by
great activity of the mind. Error and delusion lie at the foundation
of keen joy or grief. Joy rests on the delusion that lasting
satisfaction has been found for the desires. The inevitable result is
that when the {44} delusion vanishes, we pay for it with pain as bitter
as the joy was keen. The greater the height from which we drop, the
more severe the fall.
For the most part we close our minds to the knowledge that happiness is
a delusion. We strive unweariedly from wish to wish, and from desire
to desire. It is incredible how meaningless when viewed from without,
how dull and unenlightened by intellect when felt from within, is the
course of life of the great mass of men. It is a weary longing and
complaining, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to
death, accompanied only by trivial thoughts. Such men go like
clockwork, without knowing the reason why. The life of every
individual, if we survey it as a whole, is always a tragedy, but looked
at in detail, it has all the character of a comedy. Everyone who has
awakened from the first dream of youth, who has reflected on his own
experience and on that of others, must conclude inevitably that this
human world is the kingdom of chance and error, which rule without
mercy in great things and in small. Everything better struggles
through only with difficulty. That which is noble and wise seldom
attains to expression. The absurd and the perverse in the sphere of
thought, the dull and tasteless in the sphere of art, the wicked and
deceitful in the sphere of action, assert a supremacy which is rarely
disturbed.
Nothing external has power to deliver man from this dominion of woe.
In vain does he make to himself gods, in order to get from them by
prayers and flattery what can be accomplished only by his own
will-power.
The most beautiful part of life, its purest joy, is pure knowledge. It
is removed from all willing, and lifts us out of real existence. This
relief, however, is granted {45} only to a few, because it demands rare
talents and rare opportunities. Even the few, to whom it comes only as
a passing dream, are made susceptible of far greater suffering than
duller minds can ever feel. They are placed in lonely isolation by
their nature, which is different from that of others. To the great
mass of men, purely intellectual pleasures are not accessible. They
are almost incapable of the joys which lie in pure knowledge. Their
lives are given up to willing.
If we could bring clearly to a man's sight the terrible sufferings and
miseries to which his life is exposed, he would be seized with horror.
The brevity of life may be the best quality it possesses.
All happiness is negative in character, and never positive. Only pain
and want can be felt positively. Happiness is merely the absence of
pain, for it follows upon the satisfaction of a wish. Some want or
need is the condition which precedes every pleasure. But with the
satisfaction, the wish, and therefore the pleasure, cease. The
satisfaction can never be more than deliverance from a pain or want.
We observe that the days of our life were happy after they have given
place to unhappy ones. In proportion as pleasures increase, the
capacity for them decreases. What is customary is no longer felt as a
pleasure. Achievement is difficult, but when attained it is nothing
but deliverance from some sorrow or want. Therefore we value our
blessings and advantages only when we have lost them, for the
deprivation, the need, is the positive factor.
Man's real existence is only in the present, and the present is
slipping ever into the past. There is thus a constant transition into
death. The future is quite uncertain, and always short. Our
existence, therefore, is a constant hurrying of the present, into the
dead past, {46} a constant dying. On the physical side, the life of
the body is but an ever-postponed death. In the end death must
conquer, and he only plays for a little with his prey before he
swallows it up.
With such intensity did Schopenhauer feel that pessimism was the only
possible conclusion, that he maintained that optimism was not only
absurd, but really a wicked way of thought. For optimism is a bitter
mockery of the unspeakable suffering of humanity. He revolted against
the theory of Leibnitz, who maintained that this is the best of all
possible worlds. It is, on the contrary, he declared, the worst of all
possible worlds. Optimism is at bottom the unmerited self-praise of
the will to live, the real originator of the world, which views itself
complacently in its works. It is not only a false, but also a
pernicious doctrine. For it presents life to us as a desirable
condition, and happiness as its end. Everyone believes that he has a
just claim to happiness and pleasure, and if these do not fall to his
lot, he believes that he is wronged. It is far more correct to regard
misery and suffering, crowned by death, as the end of our life, for it
is these which lead to the denial of the will to live. It is difficult
to conceive how men can deceive themselves and be persuaded that life
is there to be thankfully enjoyed, and that man exists in order to be
happy. The constant illusion and disillusion seem intended to awaken
the conviction, that nothing at all is worth our striving, our efforts,
or our struggles, and that all good things are but empty vanity. The
truth is, he says, we ought to be wretched and we are.
The world is a hell, which surpasses that of Dante. One need look only
at man's treatment of his fellow-men.
Schopenhauer points to the children, who are sent {47} into factories
to work there daily for long hours, performing day after day the same
mechanical task. This, he adds, is to purchase dearly the satisfaction
of drawing breath. Everyone would have declined the "gift" of life, if
he could have seen it and tested it beforehand. But life has never
been chosen freely. Everyone would retire from the struggle gladly,
but want and boredom are the whips which keep the top spinning. Every
individual bears the stamp of a forced condition. Inwardly weary, he
longs for rest, but yet he must press forward. All movement is forced,
and men are pushed from behind. It is not life that tempts them on,
but necessity that drives them forward.
Suicide is no solution of the problem of life. It is not to be
regarded as a crime, as in the code of modern society. But there is a
valid moral reason against it, in that it substitutes for the real
emancipation from the world of suffering, a merely apparent one. So
far from being a denial of the will, suicide is indeed a strong
assertion of the will. The suicide destroys merely the individual
manifestation of life. The wilful destruction of the single existence
is a vain and foolish act. The suicide gives up living, because he
cannot give up willing. He denies the individual only, not the
species. There is a more adequate way of conquering life than by
destroying it, which Schopenhauer expounds when he deals with the
ethical aspect of his philosophy.
His analysis of the worth of human life, as represented in this theory
of pessimism, is the most passionate and terrible indictment of
existence which has ever found expression. His sense of disenchantment
is felt with such intensity, that it colours and distorts the whole
fabric of his vision of life.
There is much affinity between the character and {48} work of
Schopenhauer and that of Leopardi. In both are displayed penetrating
profundity of thought, extraordinary beauty of expression, and deep
insight into the workings of the human mind, while the same passionate
revolt against the misery of life colours the outlook and achievement
of philosopher and poet alike. Schopenhauer was acquainted with the
writings of Leopardi, and had great admiration for his work. His
subject, he says, is always the mockery and wretchedness of existence,
and he presents it with such wealth of imagery, such multiplicity of
forms and applications, that he never wearies us, but is always
entertaining and exciting. This estimate of the work of Leopardi might
with equal justice be applied to Schopenhauer himself.
As his philosophy gained ground gradually, and became known, he won
many disciples and enthusiastic followers, and for a time his theories
of pessimism became fashionable. Certain literary groups adopted them
with enthusiasm, but in that direction his influence was not permanent.
It is not in Schopenhauer's theory of pessimism that his true
importance and real significance lie. In philosophy this influence has
but faintly shown itself. Schopenhauer's direct successor on these
lines of thought is Eduard von Hartmann. He rejects Schopenhauer's
doctrine that all pleasure is merely relief from pain, but admits that
the greater number of pleasures are of this kind. Satisfaction, he
asserts, is always brief, while dissatisfaction is enduring as life
itself. The pain in the universe greatly preponderates over the
pleasure, even for those who are regarded as the fortunate ones in the
eyes of the world. The future, moreover, seems likely to bring us only
increased misery. Hartmann's practical conclusion is that we should
aim at the negation of the will to live, not each for himself, as
Schopenhauer {49} taught, but universally, by working towards the
annihilation of all existence. Schopenhauer's influence is here,
obviously, very strongly marked.
Another disciple, and a far more famous one, is Nietzsche. He came
under Schopenhauer's influence while a student at the university, and
threw himself with passionate enthusiasm under the spell of his
philosophy. Although in his later development he reacted strongly in
an opposite direction, yet all his work bears the mark of the deep
impress which Schopenhauer had made upon his mind. His outlook on life
had been changed profoundly by "that wonderful heart-stirring
philosophy," as he calls it. One of his earliest works was an essay on
_Schopenhauer as Educator_, in which he bases the greatness of
Schopenhauer on his power to see the picture of life as a unity, and to
express it as such. He is held up as the ideal philosopher, and as one
of three models for future man, the other two being Goethe and
Rousseau. Schopenhauer's insistence on action as the proper sphere of
man, as contrasted with the mere life of thought, made a strong appeal
to Nietzsche. A philosopher, says Nietzsche, must be not only a great
thinker, but a living man. Schopenhauer had not been spoilt, as was
Kant, by his education. He had seen life as well as studied books, and
so was able to see how the free, strong man could be evolved. Many of
Nietzsche's most characteristic doctrines are suggested in this early
essay, and are read partially into Schopenhauer's philosophy.
It is more especially Schopenhauer's theories of art which influenced
Nietzsche's thought, and left the deepest and most permanent mark on
his work. He adopted in his early days the pessimism along with the
rest of Schopenhauer's system. But this conception {50} of life was
not really native to his mind, and it was against this aspect of
Schopenhauer's philosophy that he reacted most violently in later life.
Nietzsche stands, above all else, for the affirmation of life,
Schopenhauer for the negation of life. In his protest against
pessimism, Nietzsche reaffirms with passionate intensity the worth of
life and the splendour of human destiny. He told men to believe in the
glory of things, and bade them shout for the joy of living. "All
that's joyful shall be true," he says in one of his poems. In another
passage he insists that "it is necessary to remain bravely at the
surface, to worship appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in
words, in the whole Olympus of appearance." It is clear that by this
time nothing of the pessimistic outlook on life had been left in
Nietzsche's philosophy.
Pessimism will always find an echo in the minds of those who by
temperament tend to see only the darker colours of the picture of life.
Too much questioning and too little responsibility lead down to the
abyss, as William James points out. Pessimism, he says, is essentially
a religious disease. It consists in nothing but a religious demand, to
which there comes no normal religious reply.
To the great mass of mankind there is something alien and repellent in
this grim and bitter outlook of hopelessness. It finds little or no
response in the heart of the normal human being, even though at times
the nightmare view may force itself upon him. "Deliverance," says the
Indian poet Tagore, "is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace
of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight. All my illusions will burn
into illumination of joy and all my desires ripen into fruits of love."
{51}
For Schopenhauer the way of escape lay in two directions. In
considering his æsthetic theories, we shall see how he found in art a
temporary release from the bondage of life, and in his ethical system
he points the way to a permanent deliverance.
It is in these statements, the æsthetic and the ethical aspects of his
system, that we find the most significant part of Schopenhauer's
philosophy. His pessimism left little permanent mark on the course of
philosophic thought. It is to the other side of his work that we must
look for a fruitful issue, to his statement of the function of art and
its meaning for life; his insistence on the will, the active element,
as that which has most reality and significance in life; to the part
which the feelings, instinct, and impulse play in his system. In all
these directions, Schopenhauer's influence has been powerful and
far-reaching. To-day he is a stronger force than any other of the
great thinkers of his time, overshadowed though he was by them during
his lifetime. In Germany especially, his influence is felt as a
powerful factor in the thought of the present day.
{52}